A Flu Pandemic?

Pedrito writes "Scientific American is running a story in this month's issue about preparing for a flu pandemic. What this article tries to convey is that a pandemic is definitely coming. Whether it's from the H5N1 strain (which would likely cause hundreds of millions of deaths) or another strain a few years down the road. There have been 3 other flu pandemics in the past 100 years. The 1918 strain being the worst, with 40 million killed. The reason H5N1 is being followed so closely is because it's already spread to people and because it's incredibly lethal (a roughly 50% fatality rate at th moment). Even if the fatality rate dropped to 5% when and if it mutates into an easily communicable form, it would be twice as deadly as the 1918 virus."

Comments

Government black ops

[arrianus]

What we need now is one of those government black-ops biolabs to mutate H5N1 (and other potential flus) into a human-contagious but not very aggressive strain. Whatever the state of technology, we ought to be able to do better than the random mutation mother nature will give us. If H5N1 mutates into a form that starts killing massive numbers of people in the wild, the black ops would release their strain into all the major airports in the US (or in the world). Whereas the natural mutation might have 5-50% fatality rate, the human-engineered would ideally be below 1%, and would immunize everyone before the natural version came over from wherever it first mutated (probably China).

This is similar to the vaccine theory, with two twists:

• In contrast to a legally-approved vaccine, this would be allowed to have a significant mortality rate. As a result, it would be fairly easy to engineer (normal vaccines are very hard, since they must be very, very safe)
• Unlike modern vaccines, it would spread between people. As a result, we wouldn't have the manufacturing problems of making vaccine for the whole world and distributing it.

My guess is that this would be illegal, or at the very least, would outrage large numbers of people. As a result, I'm suggesting the black ops approach. I was contemplating mailing the CDC and the White House with the suggestion, but I appear to be too lazy.

Note that this would only work for flus. Most other diseases are not nearly contagious enough -- a flu, in contrast, hits basically 100% of the population (usually, not very severly).

Re:Yes twice as deadly... but... perspective

[JPyun]

I find it odd that you think about people in terms of percent of world population, not absolute numbers.

Think about it. Even your (probably way too low) numbers give 80 million deaths.

That is more people than you have ever met, and will ever meet. That is probably more people than you've flown over in an airplane. Have you ever stood in the middle of a New York street and seen countless people around you, so many that each face starts to look the same?

Take each one of those myriad people. You probably saw them for a few seconds. Try and stuff every experience you've had and emotion you've felt into one of them. You probably can't do it. You'll get a headache trying, or your not trying hard enough.

Now do that 80 million times.

Dumbass.

Panic!

[EddyPearson]

Panic! Panic! Fucking Panic!

This year's thing thats going to kill us all, next year it'll be something from space.