The Gap Between Stats and Understanding In Flu Cases

KentuckyFC writes "Bird flu gets all the headlines but ordinary flu kills several orders of magnitude more people each year and represents a significant threat to our society. The frightening thing about ordinary flu is how little we understand about how it spreads. According to a report at the physics arXiv blog, researchers trying to model this process say they still don't know some basic probabilities associated with infection (pdf, abstract). For instance, given that the disease has manifested itself clinically in an individual, what are the chances of that person dying? And if a virus can be caught from a number of different host species (as it might eventually be with bird flu) what is the probability of transmission?"

Comments

Re:Is ordinary flu that dangerous?

[faragon]

Yes, it still kills people, but that its because it is massive, e.g., an inmunodepressed 90 year old can have 75% possibility of dying because of "normal flu". It's just a matter of exposition: you have more deaths by "normal flu" because of the massive exposition, in comparison to "avian flu". Let me guess that under the same grade of exposition, you could loss 1/4 of earth population, in the case of "avian flu". I think that Eukariote was trying to argue that way.

how about doing what nature intended instead

[2ms]

I have an idea. How about letting the human species's immune system continue to adapt for the flu rather than short-circuiting continued adaptation the way we are in countless other areas by creating drugs that then eventually become ineffective as the diseases evolve while human immune systems devolve and put all that research time and money toward some of the infinite number of more pressing problems that need to be addressed now? We're the one species that's going to go down as not only having messed up the planet and ecosystems for all the other species, but also the one that actually largely put the most effort they possibly could into actually making themselves maladapted to the very planet they forced the most adaption of species for.

Re:how about doing what nature intended instead

[YoungHack]

"How about letting the human species's immune system continue to adapt for the flu rather than short-circuiting continued adaptation the way we are in countless other areas by creating drugs that then eventually become ineffective as the diseases evolve while human immune systems devolve and put all that research time and money toward some of the infinite number of more pressing problems that need to be addressed now?"

That sounds great, but adaptation at the level of a species as we understand it happens through evolution. To clarify, you're basically saying, "Let the weak die (of pneumonia and complications) and the strong survive." If you believe that, perhaps by your logic we really should refrain from vaccinating kids. If they die young before reproducing, then evolution has been served. With luck, in about 20 generations we may see some difference, although we're talking about random processes (i.e. there's no guarantee).

But the old are past child-bearing age. They've passed on their genes or they haven't. How is the species to be served by their suffering? Personally, comments like the quote sound more like pseudo-science than reasonable argument. It seems like wisdom to say we meddle too much until it is your precious 3-year-old daughter in the intensive care unit.

American Newsspeak in Action

[Anonymous Coward]

...ordinary flu kills several orders of magnitude more people each year and represents a significant threat to our society.

Are you scared yet?

Vaccines are not snake oil

[brunes69]

You don't need statistics to show that vaccines work. it is scientifically provable.

You give someone a vaccine, they get the antibodies for the virus they didn't have before. You can see them in your blood. How do you think this stuff works?

This isn't saying anything as to whether or not the flu shot should be a required vaccine or not, IMO NO vaccine should be required by law, but up to the parent. And I have never gotten a flu shot in my life and I likely never will until I am 70 and at risk, because other wise it is just fear-mongering nonsense (the flu is not going to kill me, a healthy 28 year old. At worst I will get a 2 week paid vacation).

As for the video and the claims of vaccine causing autism in some? May or may not be true. IMO it is not the issue. Think of how many times a child cuts themselves on metal each year. The likelihood of them getting a SERIOUS case of tennis from these injuries far exceeds the likelihood of them acquiring autism.

There is a degree of risk in almost every treatment in modern science. You go into routine surgery to get your appendix removed, you might die from the anesthetic. But the risk of dying is MUCH HIGHER without treatment. No different than many vaccines - the risk of death from the disease is much higher than any risk of autism. Nearly ever kid in the US gets a huge vaccine regiment, hardly any have autism. To me, that makes the probability pretty small. Much smaller than the odds of dying from any of these eliminated diseases used to be.