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.
All this talk of swines, avians, and now Pan(demic)s make me hungry for bacon & eggs.
Children are good carriers. Kill the children, it's the only way for humanity to survive.
The state doesn't exactly have jurisdiction over businesses the way they do (public) schools. Things would have to be far nastier than they are for some sort of state-of-emergency declaration and the shutdown of private businesses to be politically palatable.
What's the point of closing schools if the virus isn't virulent enough to burn itself out? If it's about as severe and durable as the garden-variety flu strains that circulate everywhere anyway, then it will continue to circulate in Mexico indefinitely, and wherever else it establishes itself. We can't exterminate it any more than we can exterminate other moderate strains of flu.
So when we reopen the schools, borders, or whatever else people are screaming for, the swine flu will be there waiting... waiting to make us cough and hack and stay home from work... waiting to kill children, the weak, the elderly... waiting... just like the regular garden-variety flu that we get every year.
(I'm not a biologist, I'm just baiting a real biologist to correct or clarify anything I got wrong. Please and TIA.)
I've already read World War Z, so I'm not worried -- I'm prepared.
You don't have to reload a blade.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
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?
First link seems like astroturfing. A better link would of been [NDSSL @ Virgina Tech], where the research is being done.
As long as the governments keep drumming up the alert messages, nothing terrible will happen. Disaster only strikes when there are not enough media coverage!
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.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
2. Wait for a disaster
3. Shout from the roof top, "I warned! I warned!!".
4. ...
5. Profit!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Do they come coated in a powdered cheese? If so, I'll probably go through at least 3 dozen of them.
I think what you're trying to say here is that unless they declare martial law, closing schools and putting pressure on sporting event center owners is about all they can do to stem this. Unless you're President Madagascar (someone link to the image, thanks in advance)
moox. for a new generation.
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.
2009 H1N1 flu virus
Colloquially known as the heinie virus of 2009.
It isn't the dangerousness, it that no one has any resistance and everyone gets it at the same time. I work at a university and we are following our generic "epidemic" plan - no cases yet, but we would follow the same plan whether it was regular flu or the food service served bad fish for dinner, when 500+ people got sick at the same time in the same place it's a problem..
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Source, please? Otherwise it's just more overblown panic-inducing hype. Neither the linked article, or the article it links to say this. In fact, the second article says "So far, we haven't even identified the incubation period or how long people are infectious," and if that's the case I don't see how any computer model could be accurate.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
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.
Cluster Computer Predicts Cluster Fuck For Clustered People.
Film at 11.
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.
Try to stay at least seven people away from Kevin Bacon
uhm no. You did not Godwin the previous poster. You did it to yourself.
This is just the boogey man du jour. Got to sell those newspapers and that ad space!
TFA is a prime example of this.
The summary first links to a blog[ad space] that links to the real article[more ad space]. The real article is also written by the author of said blog.
I will give credit for the real article being an interesting read, but why not go straight to the real article in the first place?
To top that off, the second link(also a blog) in the 'fine' article is an astroturf piece for some data mining company that's whining that WHO, CDC, and one other organization are not buying his company's services and software, and pushing an international tracking system that his company 'deserves' to be part of.[his word]
The whole point of this story was to increase adviews on two websites by the same guy, and push an astroturf on another blog.
We used to blast Roland P. for this until he finally stopped. Then shortly died...Hmmm....
There are a small handful of web sites I whitelist in Adblock+, but this crap is one of the main reasons I don't feel bad about using it in the first place.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Civil and mechanical engineering are based entirely on models.
Some of the models reflect our best scientific understanding of the world. Some of them reflect ideas that have worked before and guessing (but this guessing is done very carefully).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
You know, this has all happened before. What's the worst that can happen ?
Well this is what happened last time : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
In short : 1/20 of the people who were infected died of the infection. This is a number that is too simplified : just about every baby infected died, as did just about every infected person over 75. Least affected were people between 5 and 20 years old.
Worldwide, the pandemic killed about 1% of the population. This totaled about 100 million people. The number is not well known since many hard-hit regions did not have data available : e.g. both the ottoman empire itself, and it's many enslaved populations went nearly totally unaccounted, it is quite certain that tons of black slaves of the muslims died totally untreated, and their numbers are not accounted for at all.
Just about every system in existence, whether related to health care or not was either abandoned or swamped. Entire factories were converted into hospitals, and basically nothing of the economy was operational. Trade, sea travel, ... all worked at severely diminished capacities. Hospitals emptied of docters and nurses, since they very quickly either ran, or became infected and sick themselves.
The pattern was similar to what were seeing today. The virus is present in one form of another in humans and a variety of animals, mainly chickens, monkeys of various species, pigs, goats and sheep. The pandemic was not a single virus but several similarly mutated forms of what is thought to have originated from a single strand. There were "warning" epidemics that started, but failed to cause the disaster the eventual strain caused, like we've seen today with the various small bird flew infections, the slightly bigger epidemics in malaysia and indonesia, and now the mexican outbreak.
Attacking these animals makes no sense, since the same pattern was observed then, and now : the dangerous strain jumped ONCE from animal to human (presumably ... it is also possible the virus mutated inside humans) and then only from human to human. If you want to prevent the infection from getting into a specific region, it's humans you need to worry about (e.g. an American military commander isolated Samoa using military force, which was spared the epidemic)
Please note that while we are capable of testing for the surface proteins of a virus (H1 is such a protein N1 is another) there are dozens of strains with the same surface features. It takes VERY expensive and time consuming tests to determine exactly which strain a patient has, and is rarely done at all, since there is no difference in treatment (despite all our medical knowledge, treatment for a virus infection is basically to make the patient comfortable and make sure he eats healthy).
Because of these limitations, there is very little information known about which strains and which genes were involved in causing the pandemic, and we have no data whatsoever about which genes went to which geographical regions.
The CDC has 141 confirmed cases of Swine Flu. Of those, 1 death has been recorded, in an infant in Texas who already had serious medical complications.
With 20,000 to 30,000 dying yearly of flu complications in the U.S., 1 death is hardly a significant statistic, and certainly not indicative of a pandemic. The WHO is, again, overreacting and fearmongering. The CDC has the most reliable information on the topic for Americans - not sure what equivalent other countries have. I certainly hope you're not relying on the WHO.
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."
A few deaths are acceptable to keep the economy running. We're talking millions or billions of dollars of lost economic activity.
Are you quoting who? Dr. Strange Love?
People seem to panic when they hear the word pandemic. What people are not realizing is the true definition of a pandemic. It is simply a disease or sickness that is prevalent around the globe. The swine flu can go panemic, and may not kill very many people.
It seems that most people (with the exception of the 1 child in Texas that was visiting from Mexico) show relatively mild symptoms, and recover fairly quickly from this. You need to ask yourself why numerous people in Mexico die from this, and virtual no one else outside of Mexico are affected other than a few mild symptoms? (My city has around 20 cases, all have recovered at home, or are recovering, nobody hospitalized). There are a few possibilities, 1. Mexico is a third world nation and doesn't have the level of health care that US, Canada, Europe, etc have, 2. The virus may have mutated to a more mild version, 3. Mexicans have a genetic weakness to this influenza.
The media and the WHO seem to be panicing over this, but if this is a more mild form and spreads easily, why not test our defences against a true pandemic such as H5N1 that kills virtually 100% of people who contract it? This is a great way to see if we're ready to battle a pandemic.
I for one am not scared... then again the first wave of the 1918 Spanish Flu was mild, 2nd and 3rd waves killed 100 million world wide...
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.
Expand to the stars, problem solved.
In the 1918 pandemic the world was swept by a mild version that killed very few and infected many. And then in six months in the biomass of humanity the mutagenic properties of influenza found a superflu that killed, by some reports, 100 million or about 10% of all living people at that time. At that, some think we were lucky. It could have been much worse.
But don't panic.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Not at all, unless you're prepared to launch 210,000 people into space every day. That's the growth rate of the world population.