Quote:
Originally Posted by brandonblt2
Remember ebola, swine flu, bird flu, and anthrax. The media blows these things up to create a story. 3 to 4 people will die from it and the next thing you know the media says there is a pandemic and that death is near.
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Yes, the media tend to blow things up. Yet flu
is potentially extremely dangerous, because its virus has several mechanisms to quickly mutate and also to exchange parts of genome between two different strains of the virus, if they infect the same host. (This is why flu vaccination has to be renewed yearly, not that people lose immunity, but the virus changes)
Here is how bird flu may hit us very hard. Bird flu is generally deadly, but mostly to birds because it rarely infects humans, and if it does, it usually cannot be transmitted between humans. Regular human flu, on the other hand, can be very readily transmitted between humans, but it is usually not deadly, though it is still a very serious illness.
What may happen in case of co-infection of one host (bird, pig, human, whatever) with both human and bird flu viruses, is that the bird-flu part of the genome responsible for being deadly combines with human-flu part responsible for easy transmission between humans, resulting in a virus that is both deadly and easily infects humans.
In 1918, so-called Spanish Flu killed 50-100 million of people around the world. This may happen again.
It might be even worse, as thanks to increased popumation density and air travel, diseases spread much faster than 100 years ago.
We have capability to produce vaccines now, but the process takes months. This is why the 2009 swine flu vaccination campaign was (quite stupidly) ridiculed as unnecessary, because ultimately the virus turned out to be not as deadly as feared. But the thing is you have to start vaccine production months before anyone can fully appreciate the actual risk.
What people usually don't understand how a full-blown epidemic can paralyze the society, for example by overwhelming health services (remember, doctors and nurses will become sick too). Stupid movies contribute to underestimating dangers, I forgot the title of that movie in which all those millions of infected people were immediately saved as soon as the protagonist obtained serum from a single immune monkey. This is complete BS. That might help a few, maybe a few dozen people, and that would be it.
One movie that shows with reasonable scientific accuracy how such epidemic could look like is Contagion from 2011. I highly recommend watching it.