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.)
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.
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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
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?"
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.
Try to stay at least seven people away from Kevin Bacon
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.
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
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...
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.