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Camels May Transmit New Middle Eastern Virus
sciencehabit writes "Ever since people in the Middle East started dying of a mysterious new infection last year, scientists have been trying to pinpoint the source of the outbreak. Now they may finally have found a clue in an unlikely population: retired racing camels. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates produce and consume large amounts of camel meat. The authors of the paper point out that huge numbers of camels are imported to the Middle East from African countries as well as from Australia, where the animals were introduced in the 19th century and which now has an estimated 1 million feral camels. (Australia started exporting camels to Saudi Arabia for meat production in 2002.) That raises the possibility that African or Australian bats harbor the virus and camels carried it to the Middle East."
I was on the third sentence in the summary before my brain caught up with what I read in the first sentence and I stopped picturing some kind of sneaker-net of racing camels, carrying infected USBs between nomads' camp-site computers.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
The Haj is coming soon (i believe it will be October). If MERS escapes into the pilgrim population, it will be a global disaster. Packing millions of people into the track around the Kaaba or the Plain of Arafat will be a perfect place for MERS to spread. Then they will all get on airplanes and scatter around the world. MERS has a very high mortality rate WITH modern medicine intervention. If pilgrims start taking it home to villages in Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc where there effectively is no medical care, lots of people are going to die.
No. It was: 'What does camel taste like?'
I have to admit, goat is surprisingly good.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I guess this is what you call "a camelwoe".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Camels aren't OK for Jews to eat, but they are for Muslims. Halal is a lot less restrictive than kosher, but rather arbitrary at times.
Not really less restrictive, just defined differently, and in ways that are sometimes open to interpretation. Kosher rules for whether animals are edible are defined by the shape of the hooves, so camels get lumped in with pigs. Halal depends on whether the animal is warm blooded and a strict herbivore, with the explicit exception of donkeys, and for some Muslims, horses. It's the same with seafood; kosher rules talk about fins and scales, while halal rules depend only on whether the animal is considered a fish or not (which varies among cultures).
WTF are you talking about.
A. This has nothing to do with fear mongering against Muslims, in exactly the same way that reporting on SARS had nothing to do with fear mongering against China. I say this even though China and Saudi Arabia went about managing their outbreaks in exactly the same way: pretending it wasn't happening.
B. http://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/
Total Cases: 94
Deaths: 46
C. This isn't a flu virus, this is a deadlier cousin of SARS, which spread to ~3 dozen countries in a matter of weeks
This is the promotion of unrealistic fear, nothing more.
You sound like the boy who wouldn't cry wolf.
A novel respiratory virus that's killed 50% of known patients is extremely deserving of "the promotion of [del]unrealistic[/del] fear"
The sooner we can figure out where it originates, the sooner we can wipe out that animal reservoir and rely on human quarantines to prevent further spread.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!