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New Flu Strain Appears In the US and Mexico
Combat Wombat writes with this excerpt from Reuters:
"A strain of flu never seen before has killed up to 60 people in Mexico and also appeared in the United States, where eight people were infected but recovered, health officials said on Friday. Mexico's government said at least 20 people have died of the flu and it may also be responsible for 40 other deaths. [The government] shut down schools and canceled major public events in Mexico City to try to prevent more deaths in the sprawling, overcrowded capital. ... Close analysis showed the disease is a mixture of swine, human and avian viruses, according to the CDC. Humans can occasionally catch swine flu from pigs but rarely have they been known to pass it on to other people. Mexico reported 1,004 suspected cases of the new virus, including four possible cases in Mexicali on the border with California.
/sigh. I was hoping to be able to stick with Mac virus jokes but....
No.
At this point in the epidemic cycle, that would be a premature panic reaction. Panic always and inevitably causes more harm than good.
There's a number of factors that influence decision making to limit the spread of any disease. Variables that need to be filled in before far reaching decisions are made include the transmissability and virulence of this particular strain. In other words, things that not yet been established include the number people exposed, the number of people who were exposed who developed symptoms, the number of people who developed symptons that were severe enough to seek medical attention and the number of those who died.
Some of those, you can make a guess at but you won't know with any reasonable degree of certainty for a while. Meanwhile, the public health system is keeping an eye out for new cases. Between the two, you continue to develop your model, which helps you determine just what the potential is.
Now, to grossly oversimplify and at the risk of sounding a little callous here, seriously sick people will show up at the hospital, clinic, etc. There's a number of reasons that they might not, but you can bet that if a young adult gets sick of the flu and dies, someone's going to hear about it. With low awareness, this is the group that you catch, which is not okay because there are transmissive people out there wandering around infecting other people.
The other side of that spectrum is just as bad and in the professional opinion many, can be worse. The moment that the authoritative reaction is severe, such as shutting down transportation systems, the population panics. Suddenly, you have every person with a cough and a runny nose swamping the public health system. Add to the fact that it's now SPRING and the beginning of allergy season in the southern US, and you've just made the difficult job of outbreak investigation and outbreak control much more difficult by several orders of magnitude.
The response has to be measured in a way to balance numerous factors so NO. Cancelling ar flights at this juncture would be an example of a supremely BAD idea.
Now, the moment you KNOW that it's spreading faster than you have the capacity to contain and control, THEN you take the drastic step of public alerts limited quarantine. Before then, it's just irresponsible.
The chances of these proteins from bird, avian flu combining with a swine retro virus that is easily transmittable is astronomical.
How many generations does a typical virus go through in a very short period of time? You forget that "evolutionary" time is vastly sped up for our bacterial and viral friends. In the amount of time it took me to type this paragraph these bugger probably went through a couple hundred generations, and spawned untold mutations. Thats why viruses are so hard to fight. This is especially true with influenza, which is why we don't have a "cure" for it yet.
Sometimes viruses win the genetic lottery too, especially when they get to go through billions of iterations each year. The odds of HIV/AIDs jumping from primates to a human form was also astronomical, as was the original swine flu, but I doubt that anyone would posit those as cases of biological weapons gone wrong.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
The Influenza of 1918 Killed two to three times as many people as died in World War I, in just two years. Tens of millions of people died in 2 years.
http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/