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Flu Models Predict Pandemic, But Flu Chips Ready
An anonymous reader writes "Supercomputer software models predict that swine flu will likely go pandemic sometime next week, but flu chips capable of detecting the virus within four hours are already rolling off the assembly line. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which has designated swine flu as the '2009 H1N1 flu virus,' is modeling the spread of the virus using modeling software designed by the Department of Defense back when avian flu was a perceived threat. Now those programs are being run on cluster supercomputers and predict that officials are not implementing enough social distancing--such as closing all schools--to prevent a pandemic. Companies that designed flu-detecting chips for avian flu, are quickly retrofitting them to detect swine flu, with the first flu chips being delivered to labs today." Relatedly, at least one bio-surveillance firm is claiming they detected and warned the CDC and the WHO about the swine flu problem in Mexico over two weeks before the alert was issued.
First link seems like astroturfing. A better link would of been [NDSSL @ Virgina Tech], where the research is being done.
The point is to delay the spread so that infections don't happen all at once and overwhelm the health system. See this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/health/30contain.html
The fear is the mortality rate. Sure, the "regular" flu kills 35000 a year, but that's a mortality rate of 0.1%. This flu, if it's like the 1918 H1N1, which we already know it is *not*, could be much higher. Even if it's a 1% mortality rate, this is alarmingly high. (Infect 100 million Americans, 1 million die.)
TFS leads off with 'OMG! Pandemic next week!', as does the tiny, uninformative blog TFS links to, despite lack of citation to a source that might be more authoritative than a 2-paragraph pseudo-article. Fortunately, that blog links to a story that is actually informative and somewhat related to technical matters. It leads off with the less exciting, but probably more accurate 'Swine flu may have been caught early enough to prevent a serious U.S. epidemic.' Nowhere in the eetimes.com article does it say a pandemic is predicted within a week, and nowhere in the blog TFS links to is there a citation for the author's pandemic prediction.
I'm not saying the disease isn't serious, but will someone please beat some sense into the fearmonger who cut/pasted this shitty summary together? It makes my eyes hurt just to read it, and stinks of someone trying to drive up their blog's hit count.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.