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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.
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.
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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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.
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