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Researchers Reconstruct 1918 Flu Virus
Gnpatton writes "CNN is running a story on how researchers have recreated the gene sequence for the 1918 virus which claimed 50 million lives. The mapping for the gene sequence was found on a victim frozen in Alaskan permafrost. From the article: 'Using a technique called reverse genetics, the Mount Sinai researchers used the genetic coding to create microscopic, virus-like strings of genes, called plasmids.'" Researchers are hoping that reconstructing a virus like this will help them to better understand similar problems. The structure was originally determined earlier this year.
But...please try to stick to things that can easily be killed with the tip of well-placed soldering iron.
FUD. Science must progress and if testing with 'real' virii is the answer and the risk than what are the choices, really? We wait for the research to be done on us but by the wrong people? I for one welcome my forward leaning overloads.
Heres another article at the BBC
& page=1
:(
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4308872.stm
and another one from ABC news, about how they in their enlightened wisdom (read fearmongering) think that the asian birdflu will result in similar problems.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Flu/story?id=1183172
i would have posted as ANON but aparently 212 minutes since i last posted a comment is not enough time to wait between comments
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
.. in getting them to cure the darn cold I currently have.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
What if this secured facility gets compromised, an accident happens that leads to the infection of one of the staff, testtubes are improperly sterilized. I could name hundreds of things that could go wrong, and will not even start wildly speculating what would happen if 5HN1 somehow mutates with this virus.
You can make this argument about any virus. Your argument, taken to its logical conclusion, implies that we should not do any research on any harmful micro-organism for fear of it getting out. Ignoring harmful things and hoping they go away is not an intelligent strategy.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Curiosity once killed a continent.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
We all know where this will lead...
Because they can!
time to read up on Stephen King's "The Stand", to catch up on those survival techniques.... now here's hoping I'm one of that particulat fraction of society..
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
This bug could end life on the planet Earth for man if it were to escape during this time of frequent flights and fast travel.
How would that occur, exactly, if its mortality rate less than 5 per cent (and those who recover are immune)?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
In otherwords, rather than studying this virus in a controlled environment, you propose waiting until a similar virus capable of killing millions appears all on its own.
Your reasoning is that terrorists (who so far have only ever managed to kill a few thousand people at any one time) might somehow acquire the virus, when they haven't yet managed to acquire and use one of thousands of other deadly agents.
Rebuilding an entire genetic sequence like this seems like a lot of room for mishaps. It's one thing to modify an existing sequence, and another to build up from scratch. How will researchers confirm that their new "baby" isn't some mutant Frankenstein-monster strain? Will they infect someone and then watch the symptoms, to compare against the epidemic accounts?
It's in my very own city.
I'll let everyone know how everything goes if it ev
And likely would take millions of deaths to defeat again if we don't learn anything about how it works/is similar to current bird flu's(whats the plural form of flu?). The CDC probably has enough viruses and diseases that something like this is the least of anybodies concern if something happened at the CDC and stuff got out.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Being the exceedingly paranoid type, let me ask this - if we found a victim frozen in the permafrost, and viruses don't die by freezing - is it likely that some guy might actually contract this virus again and cause another catastrophe ?. Maybe some warm summer it gets into the water table or something.
However safe the experiment in itself might have been, external contamination if the virus is out there is a serious concern. Half of Europe is immune to some strains of typhoid and plague, thanks to natural selection. But these days viruses can travel on jet airliners , in business class - they are not limited to the region of previous occurrence.
Hopefully the current healthy diets, good healtcare and lack of a recent war should ensure that another Spanish Flu breakout cannot happen.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
From the article.
The public health risk of resurrecting the virus is minimal, U.S. health officials said. People around the world developed immunity to the deadly 1918 virus after the pandemic, and a certain degree of immunity is believed to persist today. Also, in previous research, scientists concluded that modern antiviral medicines are effective against Spanish flu-like viruses.
Hope I didn't rain on your FUD, but I'm sure most of it won't get through your tinfoil hat.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
Then again, this article is hugely outdated, as a simple wikipedia article tells us they recreated the virus in 2002 already. That leads to an even more doubtful stance on the exact reasons for creating this particular strain today...
You misread it: In an experiment, published in October 2002, they were successful in creating a virus with two 1918 genes.
It does not say they recreated the original virus. The 1918 virus occured before flu vaccines had come about. As such, we currently have no vaccine against that particular strain. The researchers think that by studying the 1918 virus they can learn some information that may help with the current avian flu 5HN1.
Does the 1918 virus scare the shit out of me? Yes, just as much as the idea of 5HN1 infecting humans. But if studying the 1918 flu help combat 5HN1, I'm all for it.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Indeed. Well, just to head off about 90% of the comments which will be "oh noes the scientists will kill us all!", they are putting the DNA into plasmids, not a virus capsule. The only way this presents a danger is if they put ALL the DNA in together with the correct promoter and deliberately infected it into a mammalian host, and even then there's little chance.
Put another way, we are much more at risk from Asian Bird Flu than we are from this virus.
Incidentally, how is Avian Flu being reported in america? Here in Aus we don't hear much, even though I (and the WHO) are convinced it's the next big pandemic.
Personally I'm much more scared of avian flu than terrorists...
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
There's an interesting TV show (Canadian, no less) called Regenesis that featured just such a concept.
Hooked me for a few episodes.
$0.02 (CDN)
I am sure someone who actually knows about biology will correct me if I'm wrong... but surely the reason we are alive today is because we are descended from the people who were immune to the original strain of the virus?
"Almost" doesn't cut it. And if you think the former Soviet Union (and former United States) really eliminated their last reserves of the virus, you're seriously deluded.
> Now they are reviving an old virus that was completely eradicated. This does not make sense, other than for the nobel-prize signs in the scientists eyes (which they should not get).
The 1918 pandemic strain killed off the most vulnerable portion of the population three or four generations ago. Subsequently, mutations to that strain that were less virulent than the original appeared. These less-virulent strains didn't kill their hosts as quickly (and often, didn't kill the host at all!), and turned out to be better-adapted to their environment than the original. These less-virulent strains worked their way throughout the rest of the population. The world ended up with a not-so-bad version of the flu, and a relatively high resistance in the surviving population. All in all, a lousy environment for the original or the less-virulent strains to propagate.
Don't worry about the 1918 flu getting out. First, it almost certainly won't. Second, if it does, it won't be nearly as bad as it was in 1918, largely due to the fact that anyone who was highly vulnerable to it had been ejected from the gene pool by 1920.
> I could name hundreds of things that could go wrong, and will not even start wildly speculating what would happen if 5HN1 somehow mutates with this virus.
Don't worry about an H5N1 recombination (or reassortment) with the 1918 flu. You'd need someone to be simultaneously infected with both viruses. The probability of that is vanishingly small. (As is the probability of the 1918 flu escaping and setting up a reservoir population in birds or pigs.)
Worry about a human-to-human transmissible evolution of H5N1. If the strain currently fiddling around Jakarta is reproducing by means of human to human transmission, and if that strain is doing so via casual contact (to date, it appears that most cases from this cluster involve zoo visitors, their immediate families, and health care workers -- so we don't yet have confirmation of h2h transmission, let alone via casual contact), then worry.
If a human-to-human transmissible of H5N1 shows up, and if it's as lethal to humans as the version currently floating around Asia, you're looking at somewhere between 100M and 300M dead before a weaker variant evolves.
The pandemic of 1918 was nightmarish (the young and healthy were particularly prone to fatal infection) but I'm not sure contemporary travel would have further aggrivated the outbreak.
The soldiers returning from the fronts of the First World War possibly spread the infection as well as any buisness class traveller could today. Also, this disease is an airborne pathogen (it reproduces in lung tissue), and in its day managed to sweep the globe incredibly quickly.
One additional point made today by researchers is that the 1918 influenza was almost surely an avian flu that mutated and infected humans. It's not too different from the current superbug that everyone is eyeing warily. Perhaps some of the benefit of this research is studying how a virus mutates and crosses the lines from one species to another. Theoretically it could better prepare us to resist an impending pandemic.
One question - aren't most contemporary humans immune to the 1918 bug?
Science must progress and if testing with 'real' virii is the answer
I don't question that science must move forward, and this means taking risk. however, I'm a bit at a lose to what, exactly, this is the answer TO?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
You're exaggerating. It can kill millions and throw much of the world into a panic, just as it did in 1918, but it can't wipe everyone out like in "The Stand." Here, let me give you a little flu remedy: mix 24oz of water, add 2 tbsp ground fresh ginger, 1 tbsp cayenne pepper, 6 oz lemon juice. Mind you, these are approximations. Heat the mixture to just about boiling, let it cool just enough to take internally. Drink it--all of it. The shit tastes terrible, but it works.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Time to change your meds dude. It's far far easier to make deadly bioweapons out of more common bacteria and viruses than it is to build one of these guys from scratch. You are also not taking into account that deadly strains of influenza do in fact pop up now and then entirely on their own (as this one did almost a century ago). Recustructing the virus will enable us to take measures against it by allowing us to design vacines for it.
It would make more sense to build a weapon out of something you're likely to find in your own backyard than incurring the expense of constructing a virus from it's constituent bases.
I used to make oligonucleotides for a living (some for PCR, others for probes etc) and it's a bitch to make things longer than a few hundred bases. Moreso if you've got to do trasnscription and trnaslation to get the ultimate product (we didn't do that).
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that you shouldn't comment on something when you don't understand it. Lack of understanding leads to fear, and fear to stupid descisions being made.
Leave science to scientists.
Maybe we should start detonating H-bombs above ground again to see if we can learn something new from that ?
It might be fun actually. I think that we should to atmospheric nuclear tests on big holidays. It could be like fireworks, only much more entertaining.
I understand your intuition that reviving a killed off deadly strain of the flu could be dangerous, but given the mutability of flu viruses, the potential for new deadly strains is very much real and we have to study our epidemiological history to avoid them.
Studying viruses is very difficult, as you can only tell so much from examining the raw sequence information or using simulations. Everything from the exact mechanism of transmission to how this flu caused so many deaths to (and this is probably the most important) how this bug made it from animals to humans is still not precisely known. In order to learn such things, you'd have to directly infect some test organisms or cells and observe the effects and do other lab studies using a live viruses. There is just no substitute. (Another controversial approach involves deliberately crossing human and avian and porcine flus to try and generate one that will cross between the species)
The justification for doing so is clear, and goes beyond a desire for Nobel glory, many scientists agree that we are just a day away from another deadly and widespread flu epidemic. If we are going to predict and prevent such an epidemic, we need to really understand the kinds of features that made the "Spanish" flu possible and so potent. Another massive problem we have is the utter lack of real epidemiological surveillance in large domesticated animal populations (on chicken and pig farms, for example). Not only do we need to do this, but we need to understand the viral features that we need to look for.
-- "Sucks to your ass-mar"
I am sure someone who actually knows about biology will correct me if I'm wrong... but surely the reason we are alive today is because we are descended from the people who were immune to the original strain of the virus?
More likely because our parents/grandparents/great-grandparents were either not infected or lived after becoming infected. Doing a quick search find that the mortality rate was 2.5%. That means that 2.5% of all those who became infected died. Given that 50 million people died, that's 2 billion people that were infected. Chances are you foreparents had it.
So are we immune? No. Did we descend from the lucky ones? Yes.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
This is obviously a troll, but I'll bite:
Supposing your scenario comes true, it does not mean that everyone on earth is going to die. It means that the people who get sick with the flu will be at a much higher risk of death. It may mean that almost all of those people die, although my personal opinion is that this will not be the case, and you are probably looking at maybe 50% of the people, but I ain't a scientist.
However, not everyone gets the flu. And some people get the flu and it isn't nearly as bad as everyone else.
With or without air travel, if the 1918 flu killed everyone that even had contact with a person who had the flu, entire societies would have been wiped off the earth. I am pretty sure that didn't happen then, and dont think it happen now.
This is not to make light of the situation, a pandemic, if/when it occurs, will suck incredibly badly for a society and for families and measures will need to be taken to prevent the spread.
But extinction? C'mon. Get a grip. This isn't "The Stand."
"Look! There! Evil, pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension!" --Buckaroo Banzai
If we can recreate this virus in a controlled environment and keep it contained whilst studying it then I am all for it .
If there are any scientific grounds to the claims that it can be used to help combat a future epidemic that would kill a further 50 million+ then this is a very good idea .
Also If we had the ability to resurrect Hitler , keep him in a lab and experiment on him,find a way to prevent a new Hitler ever taking power.I would not really object to that . Though the scientific grounds for that one are a bit more shaky
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Notice the emerging pattern (1->2, 1->3, 3X2, 1->2, 2->3); next will be 3X1, or Flu kills God. Like, duh. ;)
--whoa, the flu can kill God?!? *head explodes*
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
At least the strains aren't armed with poisonous darts! :)
So, you're suggesting that we don't study the sample we found under controled conditions, and instead hope that no other flu-victim bodies up in the permafrost ever thaw and release the virus back into the environment? And that's assuming that the 1918 flu *only* exists today frozen in the permafrost; it's possible it is actually present (and mutating) in some non-human species today, and may jump-sepcies back to us at some point...
The 1918 flu didn't kill very many people directly. What killed was secondary infections such as pneumonia. Modern medicine may not be much better than 1918 medicine at dealing with viruses, but treatment of bacterial infections has come a long way since then. Besides, we don't have an entire generation of young men who were exposed to poison gas this time around.
I don't think that the 1918 flu would be the major killer now that it was originally.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
...I said pursue medical interest with caution. And I did put in the subject of retesting H-bombs above ground again for a reason: This is not ANY virus, this is a virus that killed of millions of people, our ancestors so to speak. You can test live viri, just stay clear of some of them.
As a compromise: at least put forward your testing before a medical and ethical committee before you start your experiments...
Being ignorant in experimenting with death is illogical.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I understand the potential gains we can make from this study. I know the work is important. But I don't trust the people doing the research. The military. These are the same bozos that brought us weaponized anthrax nerve gas and the nuclear bomb a host of other clever things.
You let this jeanie out of the bottle, even a little bit, even with the best intentions and you have potential to depopulate a good chunk of the planet. Last time it killed more people than died in WWII. And they didn't have modern air-travel. Just what is the cost / risk ratio here?
And this assumes good intntions. What if some military committee decides to "study" weaponizing it? In the name is national security, of course. And in secret.
We just learned how to do this stuff. Let's think twice before actually doing it. Measure twice, cut once.
Paraphrasing Oppenheimer: We spent so much energy thinking about *how* to make the bomb, that we didn't stop to ask *whether* we should do it at all.
What the fuck is wrong with you that you can't use civilized language?
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Why? How else are we supposed to understand the capabilities of the virus that will cause the next pandemic, if we don't observe a virus that caused a previous one? The nature of influenza viruses, and particularly the highly virulant ones, must be fully mapped to give us the knowledge to understand where they come from, how they spread, and hopefully, how to develop vaccines and other treatments to prevent another 1918-like outbreak.
Or we can just go "that's scary", bury are heads in the sand and be taken out when another uber-virulent bird flu makes the leap from cross-species infection to human-to-human infection.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Once again as someone that work in the field of virology/microbiology I am a little suprised by the sensationalism that gets attached to these things, especially considering the rather skeptical crowd here. I am not overly worried about the chance of this one getting out and killing a billion people. First, they have simply made the gene, there is a lot more that is required before you have infectious virus. Second, labs that work with potentially dangerous/infectious do have safety precautions (despite the general cynicism of /.'ers) and the incidence of scientists getting infected with what they work with is very low. Third, there have been MASSIVE leaps in medical treatment and sanitation since 1918. This is not to say that we should not worry about big pandemics because we should, but so far we have been able to survive.
The final bit that doesn't make me worry about these scientists reverse engineering the gene is the simple fact that this doesn't change anything as far as pandemic risk goes. We are just as likely to get a horrendous pandemic from a "wild" source as we are from this flu strain infecting a scientist who suddenly goes on a globe trotting spree of some kind. At this point in our global development as a species it is really only a matter of time before we get a big pandemic a la 1918. I mean AIDS is already a pandemic and if we get something that is more acute the death toll will simply be more noticable. It is far more important to study how to defend against viruses that could cause pandemics. It is not often that scientists can get a virus that they know for certain has caused one. The research that can be done now is much more beneficial than the potential risks.
"With or without air travel, if the 1918 flu killed everyone that even had contact with a person who had the flu, entire societies would have been wiped off the earth. I am pretty sure that didn't happen then, and dont think it happen now."
Actually I think that I heard the idea that some viruses are too strong for their own good, for example Ebola. If they have 100% death rate (Ebola is close) they kill themselves -- viruses need to leave people alive to get spread or need to have very long incubation period. A virus that kills 100% of the people it infects in 1 day is less dangerous than a virus that kills 60% in 2 weeks.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
"New man creates flu.
And what do you think comes next?"
New man whips up flu vaccine for known flu strain.
It's not like we're talking about AIDS or some other untreatable disease, once we know what strain we're dealing with, the only problem we have left is distributing the flu vaccine. And I'm under the impression that, unless we dig up an example of the strain that caused the 1918 pandemic, we can't easily create a vaccine to defend against it.
Welcome to the Twenty-First Century.
Ahhhhhhhhhh Choooooo!!!!!
*sniffle*
What?
Even the best-funded medical systems are not capable of handling the load of an enormous fraction of the population heading in for antibiotics at once. Even less virulent flu seasons have lead to serious strain on hospitals, and if there a virus as vicious as the 1918 one, even if a shot of tetracycline is all it takes to get rid of any secondary infections, having thousands of people rushing their children, their elderly and themselves into emergency rooms and clinics is going to simply break the system.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The 1918 flu didn't kill very many people directly. What killed was secondary infections such as pneumonia. Modern medicine may not be much better than 1918 medicine at dealing with viruses, but treatment of bacterial infections has come a long way since then. Besides, we don't have an entire generation of young men who were exposed to poison gas this time around. I don't think that the 1918 flu would be the major killer now that it was originally.
Additionaly, medical science now recognizes hte need to cover the nose. The 1918 flu was airborne and I remember seeing a video of an old film recording from the 1918 flu where a leading nurse "corrected" a lower nurses mask so that it did not cover her nose and only covered her mouth. (Back then they used scarf like cloths for masks). So even if it did get out, we have a couple more ways to help keep from getting infected.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I read in a another article that the they found a number of striking similarities between the 1918 virus and the mutations that are starting to appear in the bird flu virus. What's more worrying is that these are the kind of mutations that caused the outbreak in 1918.
You can probably do a Google search on this.
Just curious, what's the security around places like this? If these guys can hack a virus strain like this, what's the keep someone from stealing the virus and releasing back into the wild?
A: Yes. In TFA it says that one of the reasons this was approved is because it is believed that human's still poses immunity which was passed down from our ancestors in 1918.
And, speaking as an Alaskan, how could it get me if I run to the hills?
I could stay there for years. I already have a place set up.
This is exactly the kind of situation that leads to things like the T-Virus.
Time to brush up on a little reading.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
They never consider if they should do something only if they can do it
:P
Not to be a pedant, but we're actually talking about an issue with technology, not science.
cough cough cough ahchooo cough cough
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
While that's true for most flu seasons, the 1918 pandemic strain was unusual. A fair number of deaths occured from primary influenza infections in 1918. At first, scientists had assumed that the bacterial Haemophilus influenza was the cause of the pandemic (later implicated as one of the more common causes of bacterial meningitis in children).
After the influenza virus was discovered, many still believed that it only killed because it allowed secondary infections. As it turns out, the 1918 pandemic strain had many clinical features similar to SARS as well as influenza (bloody sputum, hemorrhagic pneumonia, overwhelming inflammatory response, and disseminated intravascular coagulation) from influenza alone. The most dangerous of the secondary infections was (and remains) Strep pneumoniae.
Poison gas had little to nothing to do with influenza deaths in 1918. The majority of influenza deaths among the American military occurred in state-side barracks before they even had a chance to be shipped to Europe."No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
There was a report a couple of weeks ago that the first fatalities due to the avian flu in the US had occured. Way into the report it came out that both victims were in their 80's. A stiff breeze would have finished them off.
It must really disappoint the media when stuff like this doesn't rack up the body coutn. Hell, you'd think they'd have learned a lesson when SARS made them look like assholes, but I guess not.
Isn't this epidemic researched to "death" already?
Anyway, this research seems to be pretty safe knowing we are already immune or have access to anti-viral for it.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
The press doesn't harp on it much, but anytime they mention it they call it the next big pandemic. National Geographic covers it in the current issue, and they've got a little presentation about it on their website.
And the brethren went away edified.
That makes a lot of sense. My comment was meant to address the fact that, either way, the odds of mass extinction of the species due to this virus are fairly slim, or none.
"Look! There! Evil, pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension!" --Buckaroo Banzai
which were killed by the viruses. Nuff sed.
Oh well, what the hell...
"You can make this argument about any virus."
Yeah but this particular virus killed over 50 million people.... Not quite the same as playing around with a virus that will only give you the sniffles.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Isn't it obvious? This virus will turn those 5% into flesh-eating zombies, who will then proceed to kill the other 95%.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And, speaking as an Alaskan, how could it get me if I run to the hills?
Hmm.. I don't think it worked for this guy:
"The mapping for the gene sequence was found on a victim frozen in Alaskan permafrost."
I wouldn't be terribly confident about that immunity from almost 90 years ago. If you're a big believer in it, you should be the first to volunteer to be injected with the virus. There's probbably more immunity to it in the populace than their was in 1918, but we've had almost 3 generations to lose any genetic immunity to this strain of flu.
AccountKiller
One of the best TV shows to come out of Canada recently was ReGenesis (available from better bittorrent sites everywhere).
The first season had lots of stuff going on that seems to have foreshadowed recent developments in real life - the recovery of a live sample of this same flu virus, from a victim in the permafrost plays a key role in the story. An outbreak or two of Marburg Hemmoragic Fever was also major plot device.
>
> One hundred forty-six volunteers were randomized to receive a placebo or an allicin-containing garlic supplement [
Ah, Garlic. Best vegetable ever. The antisocial geek's friend.
I prefer my garlic the old-fashioned way. One head of garlic (peel, squeeze through garlic press or otherwise grind it into mush), raw, whipped into one stick (1/4 lb) of butter. Spread over bread (cheese optional), toast, eat. Throw a teaspoon or two into a bowl of piping hot pasta (and grate some real Parmigiana Reggiano over it, none of that powdered cheese in a can crap). As a side dish, slug down a glass or two of red wine.
Take another head of garlic, peel it, and toss 3/4 of the cloves into a whole raw chicken. Slip the rest of the cloves between the skin and the meat. Roast tha mothaplucka. Good eatin' again.
(Whenever you roast a chicken, just throw another head of garlic into the oven next to the chicken. When the chicken's done, squeeze the now-mushy cooked garlic into a small jar. Dip a hunk of fresh artisan bread into the garlic mush, and then into some extra virgin olive oil. Yet more good eatin'!)
Some people think I eat too much garlic. Not true. Only once have I eaten so much garlic in a single sitting that I've been able to smell garlic on my farts for the next three days.
People at the office tend to avoid me. In fact, if I eat enough of the stuff (see above), even people whose noses are stuffed up with the flu tend to avoid me.
Haven't had a cold in two years. Funny how things works out. Must be the garlic.
Damn, I love garlic.
This sounds vaguely similar to a plot line of the TV show Regenesis from TMN (Canadian Cable). Interesting.
Exactly. Also, you may be interested to know that aquired immunity (such as what you get when you survive an infection, or get a vaccine) is not carried in the germline, ie can not be inherited.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
He was born in 1900, so he turned 18 in 1918, just in time to get drafted and sent to Europe. I don't think he ever saw action - the war ended before he got there. So they put him on a ship to come back.
Then they wouldn't let him off the ship. They left the ship anchored in Philadelphia harbor, waiting out the influenza epidemic.
Now, the story as I recall it was that they wouldn't let the soldiers off the ship because they were afraid that the epidemic would kill them. But now I wonder if they wouldn't let them off because they were afraid that the soldiers might be carrying the disease. They would be very effective at infecting the population as they returned to their homes all over the country.
But if they really were worried about 18-year-olds in fighting condition getting infected and dying... wow. It was a very serious disease.
Im assuming they're not doing anything too dangerous here, but if they were, its comforting to know that their research lab probably had several security funding cuts over the last few years (who needs security?) and the working practices of the staff probably include such classics as propping the doors open for the cleaners and not locking the safe because 'the boss keeps forgetting the code'.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Not in the sense it doesn't exist any more. It still is kept alive by the USA an Russia, who keep the virus alive for biological warfare, either defensive or offensive depending on weither they're winning or losing the war (yeah, it's mostly in their heads, but war is sick from the beginning anyway).
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
This Hitler ressurection stuff sounds scary...yet familiar.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Forgive me for being cold but the black blague sent us back over 200 years.
Yes its nice to characterize this virus but it looks like our genetics have the advantage. In a very cold statistical manor.
Not to distract from the research which is important but this is not the end of humanity.
A well placed soldering iron kills 99.9% of all known germs including flu viruses.
Actually, reconstructing the viral genome from scratch LESSENS the danger of unexpected elements in the sequence. The entire thing was put together from artificially constructed DNA of known sequence, making the process extremely controlled. At the end, the researchers knew exactly what they had down to the last base pair, and the goal was to accurately recreate the 1918 flu virus. So that's what they produced. If their virus was not just like the original 1918 strain, their research is not very helpful to the fields of epidemiology or virology.
Freedom: "I won't!"
No. Most of the people who were alive then, to get immunity from surviving the infection) have died. We might have partial immunity from related infections, but it's not excellent protection. Sometimes entire population groups have an innate resistance: SARS, for example, is much more likely to kill Asians than Europeans because of some cell-level differences.
What we do have is a much better understanding of how viruses spread, and how to minimize the spread. The simple precautions of handwashing and isolating the patients go a long way to keep the lid on an epidemic.
take over if an outbreak similar to the Spanish flu virus happens. While he say's "he's not predicting" anything, he wants the military to take control of the quarentine effort in case it does.
...
"A call by President George W. Bush for Congress to give him the power to use the military in law enforcement roles in the event of a bird flu pandemic has been criticized as akin to introducing martial law."
"Giving the military a law enforcement role would be an "extraordinarily Draconian measure" that would be unnecessary if the nation had built the capability for rapid vaccine production, ensured a large supply of anti-virals like Tamiflu and not allowed the degradation of the public health system.
"The translation of this is martial law in the United States," Redlener said."
Your reasoning is that terrorists (who so far have only ever managed to kill a few thousand people at any one time) might somehow acquire the virus, when they haven't yet managed to acquire and use one of thousands of other deadly agents.
I'll go along with that and take it a little farther (Wisely or not, for surely someone will correct me and make the discussion more interesting).
Bombs are easier to gather material for, easier to construct, and cheaper to deploy. They also make loud noises inspire media with an endless number of "horrific" headlines that instill fear in the general public. That's why terrorist use them.
I would argue, despite my lack of expertise in the subject area, that biological weaponry isn't easy enough for terrorists. It is more likely that we should be watching the more immature governments of the world who have the finances to conduct such research.
I want this account deleted.
Chances are, they have as many self-powered, automated, ventilators as they have intensive care beds, which in most community hospitals is perhaps a dozen.
If a more than a few dozen patients show up with rapidly fulminating viral pneumonia, (the main cause of death in the avian flu), they whole system is quickly overwhelmed.
Supposedly, the government has hundreds, (thousands ?) of ventilators on standby for just such an emergency (or terrorist act). Look at what happened in New Orleans recently for a live example. Hospital staff were keeping people alive with small self inflating (Ambu) bags. It takes one person to a patient, every minute of the day to keep them alive that way. That person squeezing the bag can't do much else either.
If you get it, chances are good that you're going to die.
God creates man. ...
God creates flu.
Flu kills man.
God creates new man.
New man creates flu.
And what do you think comes next?
Woman kills man for doing something so stupid?
The news is full of stuff about how deadly the bird flu will be when it strikes. Now, the news says that the 1918 flu was linked to bird flu. But those of us who are over 40 remember the same sort of talk back in 1976...about 'swine flu.' Swine flu killed healthy soldiers at Fort Dix, NJ in 1976 and was alleged to be the same as the 1918 flu that killed millions. As a result, the president at the time (Ford) ordered a program of national vaccination for every man, woman and child in the United States. Most people received the 'swine flu' shot which made most who received it a little sick for 1 or 2 days. Then the swine flu didn't appear and everyone forgot about it. Now, supposedly the '1918 flu' is coming back again in the form of 'bird flu' so I have some questions:
1) Why isn't the current president ordering vaccinations for everyone? The technology of making flu vaccines is pretty routine, even if the flue is alleged to be unusually lethal. Instead, President Bush is talking about imposing martial law and using the military to quarantine those portions of the country where the bird flu strikes.
2) Why is the 1976 vaccine that was allegedly protective against the '1918 flu' not being resuscitated and updated to be used in 2005?
The mapping for the gene sequence was found on a victim frozen in Alaskan permafrost.
So you're telling me that this guy was walking around rural Alaska with the gene sequence all mapped out and written down on paper, died from the flu whose gene sequence for which he was carrying the mapping, was frozen with the paper on him, was found 87 years later, and credited with having the gene mapping all along?
I'm sorry, that just sounds a little far-fetched. Isn't it more likely that the mapping for the gene sequence was produced by modern scientists using genetic material found on a victim frozen in Alaskan permafrost?
This is a little OT, but its interesting how different our culture would probably react to this flu today.
My great-grandparents sent my grandmother to live with her cousins on a farm for 18 months so that she would be safe, in the end she avoided the flu, but one of the cousins died of it. What would happen today? Would people take such extreme steps?
forget it.
Read your history. The 1918 Spanish Infuenza was particulary deady among 16-34 year olds. It isn't the flu, but the body's overreaction that killed people by filling their lungs with liquid. It was the vigor of their immune systems that killed the victims.
Think global, act loco
Say hello to my little sig.
It's pretty simple, bugs have a way of mutating in the damnest ways.
Karma: a simple way of silencing those with unpopular views regardless how correct or just that view might be.
People catch colds when it's cold out, not because of the temperature, but because they tend to stay indoors and socialize more. Colds spread by being in close contact with others with colds.
So garlic helps keep people from being in close contact with each other, and therefore prevents colds.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Didn't J.Michael Staczynski of Babylon 5 fame do a series about extactly this thing?
I believe it was called "Jeremiah"
Mortality rates during epidemics have ranged between 53% and 88%."
http://www.emedmag.com/html/pre/ter/BT0502.asp
Not a very pretty rate. I was hoping to find stats that disagreed with you.
I don't get it.
A lot of it was moved around by military troops.
As it started there were a lot of people with low resistanced packed tightly together.
Finally, we now understand that part of the reason people died was that their immune systems over-reacted and killed them-- old people survived at a higher rate than young people with vigorous immune systems- we could probably suppress that these days.
---
It was bad stuff tho, you could basically liquify as your cells unzipped and dumped antibodies. Entire towns were wiped out. Wild animals were a big problem.
---
Cities that survived did so by shutting out any visitors (food/etc was delivered to a spot outside of town/your building- no human contact).
---
Today- we'd probably have a fierce die off. The dying wouldn't get us as badly as the shutting down of commerce- we depend heavily for things to be brought to us.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Do I need to download the latest Trend Micro security update so as to not get this virus?
Just a little reminder, flu viruses mutate rapidly, like every 6 months. The flu vaccine given this fall is last season's flu virus. Which is different from the flu virus that will circulate this winter. Some people say that taking the flu "vaccine" is a good thing. I'm not one of them. Giving someone a weakened live version of a flu that I will not ever catch again doesn't make logical sense to me. Yeah, I've heard the arguments. Don't believe them.
I'm not overly concerned by the 1918 virus being recreated. It's very likely, that should it be recreated, creating a vaccine for it would be easy. Also, this virus is nothing compared to the nasty stuff that has been cooked up in laboratories worldwide. I'm not too worried about 5HN1, yet. When 5HN1 does mutate far enough to "jump" in a big way, don't expect those stupid "flu shots" to help you. More than likely the shot will make you just sick enough to become one of the first victims. Unless of course they can actually make a vaccine for it before it jumps, which of course is unlikely in any event. Since the vaccines can only be made after it mutates and hence is already in the wild and making the vaccines usually take about 3 months, by which time it will be just about to mutate again.
Not exactly what I want to hear, having a flu right now and all.............
Then again I just came back from Korea a week ago.........and they're having this Avian flu issue.
*cough* FEATHERS?!?
The why?
/.
According to Dr Tumpey, "We felt we had to recreate the virus and run these experiments to understand the biological properties that made the 1918 virus so exceptionally deadly. We wanted to identify the specific genes responsible for its virulence, with the hope of designing antivirals or other interventions that would work against virulent pandemic or epidemic influenza viruses."
Since we get hit with flu pandemics every 30 years or so, and this is viewed as inevitable, it makes sense to me that we want to understand what are their more dangerous aspects, especially in their earliest incarnation.
CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding said, "Today's human flu viruses are all descendants of the 1918 flu, which means people have some immunity to them. What is frightening about H5N1 is that people do not have any immunity to it."
Is fear mongering such as the grandparent post really appropriate here? Don't we expect scientists to try to do something about the avian flu after so many warnings? Tumpey says that after 3 years of scientific reviews and approvals, the public health risk is believed to be minimal. Of course, if someone here can authoritatively speak to why it will break out of level 3 containment at a single CDC center and be more harmful than expected, then by all means reply to this post....and contact the CDC directly too. Maybe they don't read
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
Ebola Zaire averaged an 83% fatality rate.
Ebula Sudan averaged a 54% fatality rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola
--
"Extra Anus Kills Four-Legged Chick" -- Headline
But, looking at what happened at the superdome a few weeks ago, I'd think that you wouldn't have to outright kill off that much of a population in order to disrupt the services we depend on for modern life and cause a lot of deaths. Especially if the survivors are too terrified to enter the hot zone for food, water, etc. to get through.
You really don't need to go to that extent. The flu is a virus. That means that it's up to your immune system to knock it out. That means that you don't need to eat some nasty concoction to help you feel better once you're sick. The best bet you have is to eat things that will boost your immune system--BEFORE you catch something. The reason you feel bad when you're sick isn't because of the illness, what you fell is your own immune system fighting back. It causes fever, aches, soreness, etc. The best way to fight the flu is to give your immune system the tools it needs to fight the flu before it becomes a problem by proliferating in your system. So drink some orange juice, get plenty of rest and try to keep your stress levels from being highly elevated for more than 2 days at a time. Those are REAL flu remedies.
According to Wikipedia, we didn't hit 2 billion until 1927, and they say more about the 1918 outbreak that is pretty interesting. Global population in 1918 was about 1.8 billion.
.5% died, that would still be 20 million dead.
The mortality rate was estimated at 2.5% to 5% of the population, not those that were infected. Only 20% of the population was infected, making the mortality rate closer to 14% to 28% of those infected. Basically, if you got it, you more than 1 in 5 chance of dying.
Now, add the fact that we are entirely more mobile, and it would be devistating. We have not had a disease that spreads this quick since then, and if it was gotten lose, it would likely expose 2/3 of the population of the planet before we knew what hit us. Fortunately, we have better medicine now, but even if we reduced the mortality by 75%, you are looking at:
~20% of exposed died in 1918 vs 5% now
360mil exposed in 1918 vs. 4 billion now.
50,000 died in 1918 vs 200 million now.
200 million dead, potentially. Not guaranteed, not high, not low, just realistic potential.
Yea, I say we be really freaking careful how we handle this virus. Obviously, this is more easily spread than SARS or anything else we have seen since 1918, and even if the fatality rate was wrong by a full factor, and just
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Can't resist the Tiptree ref. The other short story that comes to mind is New Rose Hotel.
Those who read science fiction are condemned to repeat it."
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I have a post farther down with links that does the math, so I won't post it here again, but the risk is very real.
I am not against them working with the virus, but this sucker spreads so fast, they need extra ordinary steps to contain it. We don't want the guys in charge of security at Los Alamos to be in charge at this lab, that is for sure.
People mentioned how we work with the plague, etc. but those are not nearly as contagious as this is, even if they have a higher mortality rate. And virus do mutate. We simply don't want this one getting back out in the wild.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I used the word "close" I could argue that 88 is "close" to 100. I guess it also matters if people receive care or not. I admit though my example is probably not the best.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
My great-grandparents sent my grandmother to live with her cousins on a farm for 18 months so that she would be safe, in the end she avoided the flu, but one of the cousins died of it. What would happen today? Would people take such extreme steps?
This goes back a bit on a different disease. Polio, one of the ones that the US has greatly worked on eradicating (along with smallpox and some others). Polio is the disease that you get a check for in gym class in elementary to this day. Back when it was more common, people that could afford to would send their children out of the cities to the country side to get them away from the cities. Most of the people that caught polio were in the cities. My grandfather was one of them, President FDR is believed to have been another. That was a "mere" 60 years ago. Ask your parents/grandparents about polio for more details.
For today? I don't know if people could get there kids far enough away. Not many people live or have relatives who live on farms. One of the advantages of mechanization has been that we can have (at this point) under 2 % of the population feed the other 99% as opposed to the way it used to be of 95% needed to feed the other 5%. So I think it might be quite hard to do that.
The same strain of flu can't travel as easily due to two major advancements in medical knowlege. The first being anti-biotics. Most people don't die of the flu (or pneumonia or a few others). They die of secondary infections that can surface when you have a weakend immune system. The second is this. We know about how to defend against airborne viruses (such as the flu). Back in 1918 people would cover their mouthes, but not their noses. I remember one program on the 1918 flu where they showed an old recording of a nurse "Correcting" another nurses mouth covering so that it did not cover her nose. The 1918 flu sitll had the problem of lungs filling up with water. Not sure if that was due to the flu itself or one of the secondary infections. Hopefully we can deal with that with todays technolgy. Either way, it won't spread as quickly once people start taking precautions. However, before we take precatuions it will probably spread faster due to air travle and the higher amount of travel in general today compared to 1918.
As for what might happen if we had an epidemic of those proportions or larger that we can't contain? Check with the CDC (Center for Disease Control) to make sure, but the following is my theory. First thing would be that Hawaii and Alaska would try to isolate themselves as much as possible from the rest of the country. The borders would probably close with no one allowed in or out. (And if we were serious we'd station a batalion on each of the borders to enforce this.) Regional areas would probably try to quarantine themselves with restrictions on travel and movement put in place to try to keep the disease from spreading. Interesting enough, Stargate SG-1 on the season ender just had one where we had a plague get loose in the general populace. "Long" incubation period of a few days where people were carriers/spreaders prior to symptons showing and death not long after. I think they had large cities in the US infected in under 4 days after symptoms started showing. There has been a lot of studying on how quickly a viruse can spread depending on mortality rate, incubation time and a few other things. So far, most of it aint pretty.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
What in earth can make scientists behave so irresponsible. They eliminated smallpox from almost all laboratories a few years ago to make sure it could never be used again. Now they are reviving an old virus that was completely eradicated.
The difference in smallpox and in this case flu virus is that smallpox has been eliminated in all natural outbreak forms. This is only possible because the smallpox virus DOES NOT have a natural reservoir anymore in nature besides human beings. And in the 70's WHO took it upon themselves to eradicate this virus by vaccinating anyone that lived within certain radius of a reported case of smallpox. By doing this, the smallpox virus had no other host to jump to, and in the end would die out. On the other hand, the flu virus has not been eradicated, in fact I doubt it will anytime soon. See the flu virus has many natural reservoirs in nature, it can use birds, pigs and other animals as its host. This makes is very hard to eradicate it in a practical manner. Another thing is that the 1918 strain of influenza was not very well known, and that just by pure chance in mutations, it is possible for a similar strain to surface again in the future. Because of this, scientists have been researching on this strain and by knowing it's DNA seqeunce, we are able to prepare for similar incidents in the future.
Bottom line, this virus is not extinct as you think it is. For all we know it could be in some bird or pig out there, just waiting for the right circumstances to spread to the general human population.
[insert generic slashdot meme]
this will help them to better understand similar problems
Such as killing 75 million people? Of course the technological/technical issues sure have a broader range of potential applications, but right now I can't think of any.
IIRC it was a somewhat long and debated decision when the last batch of smallpox was destroyed, but all in all it was considered a good thing. Why should we go the other way round?
The mortality rate was estimated at 2.5% to 5% of the population,
My bad, I was using the same wiki page but missunderstood that statemeant. Thought it meant of people infected, not of the entire population. That's where my numbers went wrong. Thanks for the correction. I'm morbid enough to wonder what other kinds of viruses they have at the CDC (besides smallpox), and curious if they have an "Andromeda Strain" solution of a nuclear warhead to wipeout anything before it gets loose. 1 million degrees should kill anything.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Why, back in my day, I had to trudge through twenty miles of snow every day for forty years before I could catch the flu. But nowdays, getting the flu is so easy when you young'uns have your "reverse genetics" and other voodoo magic tricks.
Did you every think that? Uh? But then again as the old saying goes "Life will find a way"
At least I read this story on Digg this morning, so I have already gotten my vaccine while you Slashdot readers scamper to your local flu clinic for the vaccination (which is now in short supply due to the late breaking news here).
Poor dead slashdotters...if only the news had been here earlier!
That is indisputably the dorkiest sentence I've read all week.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
You better send those researchers a memo or something. I'm sure they're being all careless and shit, flinging beakers and test tubes back and forth across the lab, since they must not understand the danger.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Pardon? Which continent did curiosity kill?
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Strictly speaking that's true, although the way you've worded that, you might lead people to believe that there is some doubt that FDR had polio. Who doubts this? Why?
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
You, are becoming Gods. There's a new master of creation, and it's you! Unraveled DNA, and at the same time you're cultivating bacteria strong enough to kill every living thing! Do you think you are ready for that much power? You lot? You lot? Cheeky bastards. You're running around science like kids with guns, creating a new world, while the world you've got is stinking, but, hands up, hands up anyone who thinks you've got it right. Yeah, there's always one. I can see you. If you want the position of God then take the responsibility.
... the quote just seemed apt somehow
by thrill12 (711899) * Alter Relationship on Wednesday October 05, @03:28PM (#13725653) ... (no pun intended). What in earth can make scientists behave so irresponsible. They eliminated smallpox [who.int] from almost all laboratories a few years ago to make sure it could never be used again.
g ursky_smallpox.html
----
Some think that smallpox is not gone...
Although WHO subsequently allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to retain samples of variola,2 the etiological agent of smallpox, the disease began fading from the memories of most Americans.
Nearly a quarter century later, the disease has entered U.S. consciousness once again as intelligence suggests that other countries besides the two depositary nations have retained or obtained variola.
http://www.homelandsecurity.org/journal/Articles/
Has anyone considered that if a bug like this got loose it could actually save the human race?
Overpopulation is a major problem. Since we have no natural predators, our only population control is through disease and war.
There are absolutely too many people, and that ugly fact is shown through the increased levels of pollution and habitational squalor throughout the world.
The moral of my story? Don't get your panties in a wad because people might die. After all, we don't really die anyway. We just change forms and go to a (hopefully) nicer place. Less of us walking around in this form would do the planet some good.
Ok, now this is getting bizarre. This week's episode of ReGenesis on CTV dealt with the old Spanish Flu virus being recovered from a corpse frozen in the permafrost of Nunavut. Either ReGenesis was dealing with very current information when it was scripted, the science teams are doing "No, it's really true!" reporting after the episodes, or someone isn't doing their fact checking.
http://www.regenesistv.com/
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Currently the virus can spread from bird to bird and from bird to human. However it does NOT spread from human to human
When the virus infects humans there is a very high fatality rate, and a brutal morbidity(needing hospitilization) rate. This is the first strain (N1) of its type (H5) that we have encountered, so vaccines can't be produced. There is a fear that this "bird flu" H5N1 will mutate into a strain that can jump from human to human. This is a very real fear, as flu is known to make these jumps. Even conservative estimates place the death toll in the millions if a Human to Human H5N1 flu emerges.
Tamiflu and Releenza are anti-virals that have been suggested as treatments for H5N1, however there are some reports that these treatments have been inneffective, with only mild attenuation of viral load. However Tamiflu and Releenza are the only available known treatments available, and these drugs are in short supply.
Hope this helps
Storm
that'd be 25% you retard.
2.5% death rate is 1 death out of 40 infections.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
The devastation from a bomb is easier to gauge and to some extent you can control who gets hurt.
Once a virus is released, you can't control who is eventually infected (aside from mass vaccinations, assuming you can make one).
Thus a bomb is more useful to a terrorist in that they can hit hard at their intended target without risking much damage to those the purport to be fighting for.
Well, since the 1918 virus was essentially already extinct, there was no reason to create a vaccine to defend against it today. But now that it's being reconstructed...
Eh. Big deal. Even if the next virus wipes out 99.99% of the Earth's human population there will still be tens of millions of survivors even without vaccines. More than enough to carry on the species, probably even enough to carry on civilization uninterrupted. Really, as doomsday scenarios go, it could be worse. Human existence today just isn't as fragile as it was a few hundred years ago. Individuals may not be much stronger, but we more than make up for it in numbers.
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
Jes' a wisecrack. Curiosity may yet do so. ;-)
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
"The government is actively being lobbied by drug companies"
Your logic fails here. There's no money in the vaccine business, which is why the US was so hard-hit a few years back when a British manufacturer of flu vaccines lost their license.
The pharmecutical industry has nothing to gain. They're more interested in treating long-term, incurable diseases. The flu goes away after a couple of weeks, but diabetes is forever. As such, nobody manufactures flu vaccines, but everybody and their mother wants to sell you some new blood-sucking iPod.
I would be much more worried about the new avian flu we are facing today. according to the NY times, it so far has had a mortality rate of 60%, namely, nothing we do has any effect.
our only real luck has been that it doens't spread well from person to person yet.
"Well, since the 1918 virus was essentially already extinct,"
No, it's dormant, which isn't the same thing as extinct. It and/or its descendants are out there, always have been, but various things have gotten in the way of it becoming the pandemic it has the potential of being. We're not talking about small pox, we're talking about something like the bubonic plague; it's something that continues to kill today, just not enough for CNN to notice (yet).
Now, we can sit back on our laurels and hope that a bunch of random factors (many of which we have no control over) stay in the way of another lethal flu pandemic, or we can do something proactive about it.
So lay off the hypochondriac sarcasm already.
what I'm curious about, and I really don't know the answer. If this strain was something my grandfather (for example) had and lived through, wouldnt it make it likely that people that are alive today would be of the strain of people that can survive the virus?
Androk
Strictly speaking that's true, although the way you've worded that, you might lead people to believe that there is some doubt that FDR had polio. Who doubts this? Why?
r -usat_x.htm
Since I wasn't positive at the time if FDR had polio, I did a quick google search and came across a page that said it may have been something else that most doctors didn't know about at time. Something called Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-10-30-fd
I don't know if he had polio or something else. All I know for sure is that he was pretty much confined to a wheel chair.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
The flu vaccine given this fall is last season's flu virus. Which is different from the flu virus that will circulate this winter.
A little off here.
What happens is that around october of each year the world health organization has a meeting with around 100 counties where they discuss and look over the data collected over the past couple of month of new version of influenza and which ones are spreading. Based on that data they make a recommnendation on what to include and then each country makes up thier own recommendations and add or subtract according to thier own needs.
So you are getting a mostly upto date version.
As for effectivness research says that around 40% effetive in elderly and close to 90% in school aged children. Not that bad if you are in thoses categories.
I don't know, but I have a little experiment in mind...would you please sign this form?
Let's see here... ...
God creates man.
God creates flu.
Flu kills man.
God creates new man.
New man creates flu.
And what do you think comes next?
Woman kills man for doing something so stupid?
Woman creates dinosaurs..
Defining Statistics and Social Research
First, immunity is not inherited. Curiously, the 1918 virus mostly killed young people, not old. The reason for that was that the older generation went through a similar virus pandemic 30 years before and had much better immunity against the 1918 strain.
1 /laurie-garrett/the-next-pandemic.html
2 /michael-t-osterholm/preparing-for-the-next-pandem ic.html
Secondly, the Influenza Virus still exists. It mutates quite a lot and reconstructing the virus from 1918 does not really bring much new, we already have quite an idea how it works. The virus has a few variants and they tend to appears cyclically. The new Bird flu is a close variant, and is certainly out there in the wild.
Thirdly, the same bird flu is in circulation now and is probably going to cause a new pandemic in the next few years. It is a pretty damn good idea to study those bad influenza strains NOW.
Read the following Links:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay8440
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay8440
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/2005/4.html
In short, we are not talking about a virus that does not exist here. We are talking about a very common virus with a slight mutation. And that particular mutation is very dangerous.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
So, I guess my great grandfather died of bird flu. How comforting.
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
I'm getting my 'flu shot on Monday so I hope that the "vaccine" exists. If not, myself and my favourite health care person are going to find ourselves looking at each other and wondering what to do with our time (to be polite). I'm rather old, and the 'flu kills old people here in France. Liberté, Egalité, Fraterité, if the order doesn't work for you then change it - it's the overall idea that counts. If there is something wrong with the idea, it's that they left out Sororité - I'm not THAT old.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Apparently they are looking at some kind of black oil based virus, according to a Cigerette Smoking Man anyways
i agree, the drug companies are not able to produce an antivirus for this any time soon, if either of them (the current bird flu or the old hispanian flu), breaks lose, we can only win in the terms of finance.
however, this might preserve the nature for a while, cause when there are less people around, there's less pollution and greenhouse effect gases. so this is kindof a longterm investment from some freaky point of view.
concidering the threat created by these viruses, i suggest you enjoy your life until you have it, and not to make longtime investment plans until an antivirus or vaccine has been created. (on the other hand, who cares if you loose some $ if several ten millions of people are going to die ?)
i better get back to debugging, the real life is just too depressive.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Having an immune system good enough to defeat the virus does not have to do anything with luck...
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
It's pretty simple, bugs have a way of mutating in the damnest ways.
If a bug could have mutated to attack all life, it would have done so by now.
Will people please stop quoting Wikipedia as a credible source.
Do you poster have any idea what happens when 30% of more of a population gets an infection like this? The medical system is overwhelmed. You are instructed to stay home and deal with it, or die. You are better off at home, because the hospitals are the best bet to get sick. My grandfather lived through the 1918 epidemic. An infected house tied a white rag on their door. Once a day the fire department would fill a pot full of thin soup if left near the curb. The dead was picked up and buried in a communal grave. The state militia had orders to shoot anyone attempting to leave the town. What makes you think it would be any different today? All the meds would be gone in a few days. Can you imagine the economic fallout today of a pandemic?
It's nice to have another smudgepot in the fuds arsenal, isn't it? My money is still on smallpox, however. Or if that's mutated into mildness these days, on the Russian-strain tuberculosis bacterials. My none-too-subtle point, if you can call it that, is how does a campaign to reconstruct the worst plague in human history get funded, anyway? Basic research? Black ops? The next phase in reassurance, of course, is pointing out that reconstructing a DNA sequence is not the same as reconstructing DNA, which is kept under the strictest security anyway. I know I sleep soundly.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Yes you can make this argument about any virus. And the argument is, the fewer viruses we have like this the better! If you want to think along these people's ideas then
I think that there was a Numb3rs about this very same issue last season wasn't there. Bottom line, in my opinion, is that the scientists should work with less virulent viruses to see what makes them tick
Actually, I think there could well be some things still to be learned from above ground H-bomb detonation.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Ok, off to eat a bullet. Thanks for the advice and all. See you later...ummm...wait...I guess you won't be there.
It's not really surprising how deeply rooted the "virus equals evil" idea is in most people, but some of the comments here are nothing more than FUD.
First of all: this virus was never "eradicated". There was no vaccine, no miracle drug. Influenza is an RNA virus, so it mutates very quickly. Many of today's influenza viruses are actually descendants of the spanish flu. And they're usually more successful because they're not very deadly.
1918 was just the perfect time for a deadly pandemic. The economy was a mess, there was a major war going on and people were hungry all over the Western world. The spanish flu spread like wildfire and infected virtually everyone, but the human species is genetically diverse enough to (as a whole) survive even the worst viruses. For one, there are hundreds of different versions of Major Histocompatibily Complexes among us.
You have one, 99% chance your neighbour has another, each with a different specialization. The spanish flu probably killed a lot of people with the MHC especially unsuited for fighting it.
MHC evolution and genetic diversity
It may sound ridiculous, but viruses of the past likely made us human in the first place. The human genome contains proteins that might have been useful to survive prehistoric plagues, but perform different functions today. For examply, you might have a protein that happens to bind rather strongly to a viral anchor protein from 900 million years ago, but with a minor mutation it might just as well facilitate mammalian cellular respiration.
And then there's retroviruses. Since those can be inherited through infected germline cells, it can become very interesting for a virus to become mutually symbiotic (a dead host doesn't reproduce all that well, now does it).
Chimp caught a virus, became human
Some environmentalists like to call the human species a virus. They may be right in an entirely unintended way: a substantial part of our genome consists of viral DNA.
I for one welcome our old virus overlords.
Ah. Interesting article, thanks for that.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Whew. I was dreading you were going to say "Atlantis" or "Lemuria" or somesuch.:P
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Another release of Resident Evil to me.......
No. That was libertine immorality, and a diet of sugary breakfast cereals.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Wow, it's like the plot of ReGenesis come alive. I suppose that's because they already knew how researchers were putting the virus DNA back together when they wrote last years overarching plot line, but still, I'm impressed at how the science seems to be accurate and well-conveyed. I wonder when (if) season 2 will appear.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
And they always mutate to become more contagious and less deadly. It's not like the virus hates humanity, it just wants to reproduce. A virus that kills every host it infects is not a successful virus, because it needs the host to survive and propagate.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
60%!?!
HOLY BATSHIT, BATMAN!!!
QUICK, EVERYONE PANIC!!!!
Oh, wait, it is actually less than 60%, and the number of cases is under 150, and the number of fatalities is actually less than 100.
Oh and ALL the cases are in areas that I have come to associate with grade A, Prime, top notch health care (NOT!!), good hygiene (NOT!!), and excellent diet (NOT!!), such as rural Vietnam, Hong Kong, rural China, etc.
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
I wonder how the Intelligent Design guys plan to explain this virus.. why in the bloody heavens did a creator create this virus..
Some things must simply be sacrificed in the name of electrophoresis-gel-in-a-rubber-glove football. For any of those that may object play it first, then come back if you still doubt the value of this unfortunately rare, but highly enjoyable pastime.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
I don't think the plan ever was to stop the plague; I got the impression that was impossible (probably would cause a time paradox). The mission was to find out the source of the virus and get a pristine sample so the people in the future could figure out how to deal with it and get back "on top". Bruce Willis failed, but they did find out where to get the stuff.
Actually, I am just as morbid. I spent two hours researching different flu bugs and plagues. It is interesting... from a distance.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Ok, I am not a doctor, but as I understand there are two ways to be protected from a virus:
You get it (or a dead version of it in a flu shot), so you get an immunity to it, you are not likely to get it again. or:
Your ancestors get it, it wipes out 90% of them, so natural selection means you are less likely to get killed by it. I don't think that viruses would normally apply to natural selection. Maybe. I dunno.
I am guessing you are SOL, and would be just as likely to get it since immunity isn't passed down like DNA.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
What people SHOULD do is quote the original encyclopedia acticle
that the wikipedia one is based on. Identical wording aside, the
encyclopedia is the *correct* one.
Keep in mind, there have been too few get the Avian Flu for the statistics to be even remotely useful. Accorinding the WHO, about 39 of 52 people who have contracted it have died. This means that about .0000008% of the entire world population has contracted it, and about .000000848% of the entire world population has died from it. This is not exactly the same as the 1918 "Spanish Flu" pandemic.
This absolutely does NOT mean that 60% of the people who would get it in a pandemic would die. To even use the 60% number is totally insane considering the insignificant sample we are talking about, UNLESS you are honest enough to mention the miniscule numbers that have been infected so far, to put it in perspective. Otherwise, it is just pure fear mongering.
So to put it in perspective, it has only infected a very small tiny number of people, and it has killed 60% of them, thus the potential for deadliness is real, but the sample is too small to be of any statistical significance.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!