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Distributed Computing Attacking SARS
fwc writes "D2OL has added a SARS Target to it's distributed computing project which locates potential drug candidates for several viruses. At this point, I've replaced SETI@Home at least temporarily on all of my Boxen. There are clients available for Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and of course Windows."
Looks more usefull then finding the odd alien out there :P
-- signed for your pleasure --
Who owns the results once they've been calculated? Who gets paid royalties when a drug is developed from this data? I'm not going to donate my CPU time if SARS sufferers have to pay royalties (either directly or indirectly) to GlaxoSmithcline or the US Government (which IMHO isn't any better than a multinational corporation) for their medication.
Unless the results are released into the public domain or at least licensed under a BSD- or GPL-style license, I'm not touching it.
OLPC Australia
I know how to cure SARS.
You give 8 of the most powerful businessmen in America SARS.
In two months, there will be 3 or 4 different cures.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
How do all of you out there feel about contributing your computing cycles to the private sector? Previous iterations of this idea have been through nonprofit/university research institutions, but this new post seems to be private enterprise driven. As noble the goal D2OL is working towards is, i still feel odd about the whole idea. I pose the following question to the general Slashdot community: How do you feel about your computing cycles being used for the research and development of pharmaceuticals (or any other imaginable private sector application) and said company reaping tremendous profits from this show of goodwill?
If they find the correct drug against SARS, will it be free? or will it be patented and only the rich countries will use it??
Here's a question.. Suppose i download this thingummy and run it and jackpot, a miracle cure for SARS unrolls in front of my eyes. Do I have any sort of intellectual property rights over my discovery? And do I have the right to prevent the distributed software Im running from connecting back to the server and giving them the good news?
Does this mean I might win the Nobel Prize???
Not that I'm going to do anything like that. Just wondering if the guys behind the thing have thought through the legal issues.
I have found a truly wonderful proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but unfortunately this sig is too small to contain it.
If you're already searcing for E.T. and not a cure for cancer, why would you search for a cure for SARS? SARS is scary because it's new not because it's a currently uncontrollable viral disease, we've got loads of them. HIV/AIDS, TB, the common cold. Somwhere between 80% and 95% recover quite nicely from SARS, IIRC 500,000 die each year of the flue, you don't see us jumping around over that.
Disclaimier: I'm not saying SARS shouldn't be fought, all disease should, but let's all get some perspective.
(To back some of this up with a _little_ more reliable resource found through Google, look here)
Look a monkey!
The freenet project may be of interest then...
There are much more dangerous illnesses than SARS which affect much more people. There are 2000 people sick with SARS but 40 million with AIDS. And the death rates for AIDS is 100 % percent. The numbers for cancer are even higher (not the death rates).
This seems to be rather a angst-hyped PR champain instead of real science. The problems we have now are elsewhere.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I'd be inclined to think about this one. Just a related matter. If you look at the spread of HIV around the world, the rate is slower and the powers that be may be less inclined to 1) fund research for cures or vaccines, and 2) probably more importantly less inclined to distribute treatment around the world because it has less chance of affecting them. In short, it may be something like: lets cure the world before this highly infectious disease becomes a problem for us. HIV is much more manageable, we'll let those countries take care of it themselves. If a cure for SARS is found, needless to say several things will happen: -the drugs will be made cheaply available -they will be distributed more quickly than ever before -ALL countries and all classes/races/religions will get them -the drug companies may not be able to swing a patent and expensive license manufacturig rights. How about doing this for AIDS in Africa and other areas where HIV is rife. There is no doubt it will affect everybody. It is just a little further down the road. As tragic as it is, SARS is something that will I hope break the barriers between nations (just like a funeral is the best way to get a family together). There is nothing for individual nations to play for with a visibly threatening global problem like SARS. It is just a damn shame that HIV and the environment get a back seat because those in authority refuse to see further than the tips of their noses (or election campaigns.)
You know how easy it is to catch a cold right? Well, SARS is like that, a cold. It's easy to catch. There's a damn good reason for all this hype. No one talked about SARS in china for months until it went totally out of control and people didn't realize that they should be taking basic precautions.
SARS would have absolutely no problem killing the same numbers of people if it managed to get 'free' of the quarantines and stuff
Also, Michael Mooor is a dumbass, and he has his math backwards. The more scared we are, the less we consume. SARS is death to tourism and the like in Asia, and it makes people stay home to avoid it.
9/11 certanly didn't boost the economy.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
When it comes to diseases, early overreaction is good. At an early stage there is little information about exactly how dangerous this particular disease might turn out to be. At the same time, containing the disease at this stage is easy. All you might need to do is quarantine half a dozen people.
Of course, as the disease progresses and the actual severity of the epidemic is assessed, we can update our procedures to make it less or more stringent as the need might be.
This is the same reason why firemen overreact to fire alarms by the way. It is so much easier to contain a fire in the first three-five minutes that is worth driving recklessly to the scene of the fire, even though 95% of the time they turn out to be false alarms.
I take it you don't live in Hong Kong or China then? I'll go tell my family in Hong Kong that you think they have more chance of getting into a car crash than getting SARS. I'm sure that'll make them feel MUCH better.
The way the world is reacting to SARS is much like the way it would have reacted to the 1918-1919 flu, if we'd had the public health infrastructure then that we do now. And that reaction would have saved millions of lives
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Ever did the math ?
In an average year, 10 to 20 percent of the people get infected with some form of influenza. There are different strains, so for arguments sake lets say 0.5% of the people gets infected with the SARS virus (very conservative estimate).
Based on the current deaths, approximately 3-4% of the people who get infected, actually dies. (experts are actually arguing that this number may be higher).
On a population of 6 billion, that is approximately 900,000 people.(or to put it in a US perspective 75,000 people)
Normal influenza kills mostly the weak and old. SARS does not. So far it has killed a lot of nurses and doctors.
Something to think about before making a decision on whether or not to participate.
...last I heard, the development of a new drug costs billions of dollars. Now, it's all fine and dandy to get on your moral high horse and say that "no cure is better than an expensive cure", but at the end of the day, the money to create the drugs has to come from somewhere. So if you really believe what you're saying, I see one option - see if a VC or banker will float you a loan based on the premise that "I won't be paying you back the $1,378,422,596.83 it took to research and design the drug because it just isn't important, don't you see that poor people need these drugs more than you need your money back?" If you do find somebody who'll do that, let me know, I could use some free money too..
Not that pharmcos won't do some pretty low things, but really, with the expenses we're talking about, basic economics can explain a whole lot of it.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
UNAIDS sez if we (the world) spend $10 billion a year for 20 years, it will steadily decrease the number of infections. Right now, we're spending more like $1.2 billion a year, and AIDS is going crazy all over the world. Are we not spending that money because of a focus on SARS? No. We're not spending it because the countries who would be paying $5-6 billion of that are not the ones with 40% infection rates, so they simply don't care. SARS doesn't really affect that.
On the other hand, if you read a history of the AIDS outbreak in the US, you'll find that people wish there had been a much stronger response right from the start. If we had reacted to AIDS the way we reacted to SARS, that $10 billion/year wouldn't be necessary right now -- and most of those 40 million people wouldn't have the disease.
How many people does it have to kill before we decide that it's important?
I'm actually pleased to see millions of dollars being spent now, both on contact tracing and quarantines, and on longer term research projects. If the disease can be contained at this early stage, that's a tremendous public health success, IMHO. How much time, money, and effort could have been saved (and lost productivity avoided) if we hadn't had to deal with the bubonic plague?
After decades of effort, the World Health Organization is finally close to eradication of polio. How many billions of dollars were spent there? How many iron lungs did we buy before developing a vaccine? How many people were paralyzed? The earliest evidence of polio dates back to roughly 1500 BC--but suppose it appeared today. Let's say there were only two thousand cases--total--before medical science put out that brush fire. Perhaps twenty cases of permanent paralysis, a couple of deaths, a footnote in medical literature. People might complain that the response was 'disproportionate'. Money well spent, I think.
The problem with any new disease is that you just don't know. Far better to hit too hard than to let loose the next smallpox, Spanish flu, or pneumonic plague. If we discover that SARS has a large animal reservoir or something similar, we'll be glad that we started vaccine-related research now rather than later.
I have an elderly grandmother who was rushed to the hospital for unrelated reasons shortly after the start of the SARS scare in Ontario. She was taken into an ambulance by men and women wearing full environmental suits.
SARS seems to kill between five and ten percent of its victims, and it can be spread through aerosolized droplets. In Ontario, most new cases are occurring among health care workers. Quite frankly, if the ambulance attendants are able to do their jobs while wearing appropriate protective equipment, good for them. Remember, they're also protecting your grandmother from the last patients to use the ambulance.
I live just outside of Toronto. Many of my friends live and work in the city--some in downtown hospitals. After an initial uproar, the average person on the street is only mildly concerned about SARS. Most are quite happy to put up with a little inconvenience now to (hopefully) avoid endemic disease later.
~Idarubicin
Sometimes this goes as high as 20% in places like Hong Kong, in Canada its around 15%, the 5% are fake government figures.
SARS mortality rate/Death Rate
why dont you read what some actual doctors are saying. Also take into account that SARS is mutating constantly, which means its becoming more deadly everyday, the death rate is rising due to this mutation, as the virus gets smarter it learns how to more efficiently destroy our immune system.
Do your research begore you come up with some numbers.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I work in Emergency Services, and have already had to deal with TWO suspected cases of SARS. Speaking as a physician, I'll donate my computing cycles, absolutely. The sooner a treatment is brought out, the better.
Here's how I feel about it: I hate having someone come into my ER when I have nothing to offer them. I feel a powerful ethical and professional obligation to take care of people, and do whatever I can for them. I do my best for each and every single patient I see, even if it's somebody who has been through maximal surgery/chemo for their cancer, and has literally reached the end of what medical science can do for them. For such folks, sometimes all I can do is hold their hand and offer a little reassurance, but at least it's SOMETHING. I hate having someone die right in front of me, and being powerless to prevent it. Call it a God complex if you want... I call it wanting to be able to help people. Having people die, and having nothing to say and no way to say it... well, that bothers me, call me crazy.
I don't particularly mind not having a cure for the common cold... a cold is an annoyance, nothing more. I very much DISLIKE not having a treatment for a lethal condition.
I personally don't care who develops the cure... Pharmcos are often painted as evil opportunists that prey on the illnesses of others... I disagree. I like Pharmcos, because they keep my arsenal full, which makes me MUCH more effective at my job. I don't accept Hawaii trips from them, but I'll accept lunch and a couple of pens if they're going to give me some clinically useful information (and hell, I have to write with something). I resent the AMA (I am NOT a member, BTW, for this reason and others) preaching to me about the "unethical behavior" of having dealings with drug reps. Do they really think I'm going to sell out my ethics, my oaths, and my patients because somebody took me to dinner?? I'm sorry, but that's a fucking insult.
I prescribe what I want, within the standard of care, regardless of what drug reps say. I always use cheap if I can, expensive if cheap won't work... but I like the fact that Pharmcos give me tools to take better care of patients.
The sooner a cure for SARS shows up, the happier I'll be.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.