Slashdot Mirror
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.
If you trace back to the original EETimes article (http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217201126) you'll see this in the opening paragraph:
Swine flu may have been caught early enough to prevent a serious U.S. epidemic, according to computer models developed by Virginia Tech's Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL).
So why is this Slashdot story claiming:
"Supercomputer software models predict that swine flu will likely go pandemic sometime next week"
So is the author just panicking unnecessarily or is this another case of using fear tactics to push an agenda, in this case boosting sales of a flu detection chip?
Flu season kills more than this strain will. Why isn't there a pandemic panic when we get the flu every year? This all seems so overblown to me. If this is a 5 on the scale that goes to 6, how is it that the regular flu doesn't push us to 6 with the number it kills. All these travel restrictions when you are more likely to be killed in any number of ways. The media is out of control on this one.
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"Spanish flu" came about because all countries infected before Spain were at war and had press censorship in place. Therefore, the first real public record of the pandemic was in Spain...
That is an excellent answer and the first sane article I've read about the issue.
Still, I'm not convinced it's worth it. What's the maximum N for which we should keep N thousand students out of school for a month to save a life? We're leaving it up to somebody to answer that question for us. Who is it?
And a percentage drop in population corresponds to a very real percentage drop in total GDP. Fewer consumers, fewer producers, and slowed growth and achievement.
I've read on Reddit and some other sites some extreme comments, one was along the lines of, "Would it really be that bad if two billion people died?" Yes. Complete meltdown of the social order. That doesn't mean, yay "The caste system in India will be abolished." Yes, there are still prejudices in India against people of the lower caste. No, it means "Fallout (the game) style anarchy, city states and guns for hire... yay?"
Here's the thing, there are entirely reasonable responses, and irrational responses to this crisis. Reasonable responses are like the closing of a school when several students are confirmed to have the virus, or expensive testing of hospital staff for the virus, or even, if a major outbreak occurs, closing down public venues.
Why is this reasonable? Because the moral and economic cost of a widespread pandemic that kills millions or billions of people far outweighs the paltry economic cost of closing down... a school, or a mall. And if it becomes a pandemic, and thousands or hundreds of thousands are known to be infected in a major city, it's for the good of the rest of the nation and the world at large to limit the spread of the disease and close borders and limit travel. Because to do otherwise is insanity. This isn't like throwing billions of dollars at "terrorism" and fighting an ideology, a battle that can't be won. Fighting disease is something we can, and have defeated in the past. Come on, we've damn near wiped out polio, and we actually defeated smallpox.
This is money absolutely well spent. If even 1% of people get this, and 1% of those people die, that's nearly a million deaths. If either of those figures grows by an order of magnitude, it's death on the scale of the Holocaust. And you wouldn't argue that the industrial engine of the Nazi regime is more valuable than their lives, would you?
P.S.: You got Godwined.
The main point is to delay and ultimately prevent the spread if it has a high fatality rate. 100 cases and 1 death don't give us a 1% fatality rate... we have to make sure those 100 people recover.
While we delay the spread, we can learn more about the disease and maybe produce a vaccine.
Exactly.
(A) many more people are expected to get this flu than the regular seasonal flu because humans have no immunity to this flu. In 1918 they figure half the human population eventually got it. So whatever the mortality rate is, we should extrapolate that over a higher total sick population than the regular flu.
(B) Calculating the mortality rate is hard now because there are so few cases and the reliability of the numbers are shitty. It's like trying to predict a winner off the first five minutes of exit-polling in a national election. But let's go with what we have. Mexico has ~2500 suspected (312 confirmed) cases with 169 suspected (12 confirmed) deaths. That's like 4-6% chance of dying if you get sick. There are lots of reasons to doubt these numbers or think they're unrepresentative, so let's just say it's something like 2%. Could be higher. Could be lower. But for discussion, 2%. 2% is a pretty high rate of death. Seriously. It's 1918 bad. Do you feel okay with everyone you know each taking a 2% chance of death if they get sick?
(C) The regular flu kills a lot of people per year, but it still only represents a fraction of 1% of cases.
(D) There is a lot of speculation about the "cytokine storm" factor in Mexican cases-- that this flu is more likely to kill those with strong immune systems than a normal flu. I haven't heard a lot of actual facts about this, admittedly.
(E) As said above, we're at the end of the flu season in North America. Flu viruses mutate. We have no idea what this virus will have become come October. It may be nothing, but it may be something really scary. And the fact that we're all likely to get it makes people uneasy.
(F) As much as people are saying this is a shitty time (with the economy and wars and all) to have this happen, at least we may have some time to get a vaccine going before the mystery mutated version comes along in the fall...
Not to belabor the comparison to 1918, but that was a flu that killed an estimated 2.5-5% of those infected. They say that pandemic killed up to 100 million people worldwide, or 1/3 of the current US population. This was at a time when the global population was less than 2 billion.
In other words, continue doing more or less what we have always done, improving wherever and whenever possible, without panic, fear-mongering, or hyping up the threats.
The current "pandemic" is largely an exercise in ignorance, incompetence, self-delusion, opportunism, corruption, and an unhealthy dose of general idiocy.
This is similar to the 1918 killer flu. From genetic experiments, it seems that there are two critical mutations that made the 1918 flue so deadly. The virus only has RNA (no double helix here), so is mutates very rapidly. It may only be dumb luck that is separating us from a killer of 10s of millions.
Think global, act loco
And a percentage drop in population corresponds to a very real percentage drop in total GDP. Fewer consumers, fewer producers, and slowed growth and achievement.
While that may be true, you forget the consequences. For centuries, economists have been arguing that a growing population is essential to a strong economy and culture. Well, that's as may be, but there's a limit to the number of people that the earth can support. Depending on behaviour, we are either fast approaching or have vastly exceeded this hard limit (where "hard limit" means not that the limit can't be moved, but that it exists and that when it's reached ecosystems (including people) start dying).
If a few billion people die off due to a pandemic, that would go a hell of a long way towards reducing, say, greenhouse gas emissions (especially if there are lots of deaths among the rich, unlikely though that may be). Global warming is projected to kill billions in the worst case, and even if global warming makes less trouble than our best scientists expect, what happens when there is no more clean surface water? Or when erosion due to deforestation washes a few more billions of cubic meters of topsoil out to sea? Or ...
We seriously, urgently need an economy that is not based on growth. For a while, we need one that is based on a shrinking population, and then we need to transition towards one that is based on a roughly constant population. Economists don't like this, but it's a fact of life.
Of course, killing a few billion people will not help: we'll just keep reproducing. It would be pretty convenient if we first figured out how many people we should have on the planet, and then took steps to stabilise the population, and then a few billion died off to help us get there quickly. That's not what's happening here.
I've left compassion out of this argument. Of course compassion is important, but it does not provide any means for sidestepping the fact of limited carrying capacity. And the quicker we act, the more compassionately we will be able to act.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Fighting disease is something we can, and have defeated in the past. Come on, we've damn near wiped out polio, and we actually defeated smallpox.
Just a nitpick, but I really don't think you really can compare present disease with past disease like smallpox. We eradicated smallpox with vaccines, but that was before Wakefield's Epic Trolling and the fears that mercury/aluminum/formaldehyde/anything and everything in vaccines causes autism/cancer/AIDS/diabetes/criminal behavior (I shit you not, I once read something that claimed vaccines cause criminal behavior). If you were to try a widespread vaccination program today, like the one the WHO used to get rid of smallpox, I don't think it would work. For it to be really successful, as in getting rid of something for good, I think we'd need fairly large segments of the population to get vaccinated so the disease has nowhere to go, and now, too many people think that vaccines are proof that 'they' are out to get them in some vague nefarious plot. Vaccines wiped out smallpox and have polio on the ropes, but they now, unfortunately, have way too many imaginary problems associated with them to have the same stopping power.