I'm surprised that there is so much mention of antibiotics in this thread, as the author's book excerpt submitted here mentions a viral disease, and thus far we have very few "antibiotics" that have any effect on viruses. (Usual usage in English is to use "antibiotic" as a term for a broad-spectrum antibacterial medicine. Effective antiviral medicines have only existed since I became an adult, with the treatments for AIDS being the outstanding examples of antiviral medicines.)
I get a lot of my pandemic prevention information from the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy,
which, to be sure, has an institutional reason to raise awareness of risks of pandemics, but which also links to a lot of current, sound science reporting on infectious diseases.
Novel strains of the influenza viruses or novel strains of coronaviruses are scary to thoughtful epidemiologists because they can be spread by the everyday activity of breathing. If a new coronavirus infection has a high case mortality rate, high virulence, and long latency period, it could kill many people before any of us have a chance to practice the isolation that eventually shut down the spread of SARS back in 2003. Every year, a lot of people get the flu, and a more virulent and more lethal strain of flu--especially one for which current seasonal flu vaccines provide no immunity--could kill a lot of our friends and neighbors.
I mentioned this below. A lot of the high death rate from flu is due to secondary bacterial infection, which antibiotic can treat. Antibiotics would have reduced the mortality of the 1918 flu, which was novel at the time, drastically as bacterial infection counted for the majority of deaths.
We are likely to have a decent universal vaccine within the decade. Example, one test by Inovio used a unmatched vaccine on the 1918 Flu with lethal dose in mice. All the controls died but none of the vaccinated. This type of vaccine would reduce the chance greatly that something like a bat flu would emerge without us being prepared. These universal vaccines are made by bacteria or other very fast to produce and cheap methods, compared to the popular egg method today.
The biggest issue which the WHO has been working on is to make sure poorer countries have the know-how and distribution networks to ensure they can make and deliver current and next gen vaccines. This is especially important if access to antibiotics is not common and easy.
The problem is that mortality rates are always exaggerated, because the people that contract the virus and get very sick are the ones that come to medical attention. If 10x more people contracted the virus and fought it off, and never went to a hospital or contacted a doctor, no one would be able to factor them in and reduce the mortality by a factor of 10. That's why mortality rates tend to decrease in newly-discovered diseases, we start to look harder for people infected but not killed by them.
Anyone who understands what the word "Pandemic" means should also understand that pandemic disease is an inevitability.
The question is what can we do as a society (or societies) to reduce transmission, mitigate the severity and treat the afflicted if possible. It's why Public Health is so important.
(And to be fair to the author, the piece doesn't seem to pick the super weird frame that the title of the piece does. As Mitt Romney pointed out during the election regarding his GM bailout piece, the authors don't write the article titles)
It boggles me that nobody find this article disturbing. Also written as some sort of warning for the future, yet classified in OPINIONS...
Furthermore, click on the author's name and get taken to his personal website... Where you can admire his book being promoted. And it's about scary diseases in the world that will kill us all.
If you enjoyed this article, I strongly recommend the author's book (mentioned at the end - Spillover, by David Quammen). I am about half way through and finding it very interesting.
Pandemics are overhyped. In the recent years we had 2 "pandemic" strains of flu, both of which as it turned out, were greatly exaggerated for the benefit of the pharma companies. The truth is, thousands more people die of know diseases every year (even from seasonal flu) than from any other unknown "pandemic" viruses. But this is not "exciting" at all.
Really? Here are the last three big ones, and there was a bad one in 1889–1890 about which we don't know much except that "About 1 million people died":
Spanish Flu (1918–1920), "It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—3 to 5 percent of the world's population at the time—making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history."
"Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill juvenile, elderly, or already weakened patients; in contrast the 1918 pandemic killed predominantly previously healthy young adults." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic
That was the big one, and if you talk to your elders they'll remember the first hand stories they heard about it. Few families escaped unscathed, I lost a great-uncle. A repeat would be catastrophic, and efforts to avoid it are not "overhyped", except by the always excitable media. To dismiss such a well documented, in living history threat as being "for the benefit of pharma companies" is beyond blind.
No they are not - and a lot of people misunderstand why.
It's true that in any normal year more people die from known diseases, and that pandemics are a rare occurrence. But when they happen they kill a lot of people. The 1918 flu pandemic killed 100 million people. 1 out of 20 inhabitants on the planet. And remember that this was back when we didn't fly around the planet giving a virus the possibility of spreading to the entire globe within a few days.
That's why pandemics are so scary - when they kill they kill a sizable portion of the earths population.
Around 250k to 500k people die from influenza epidemics each year (according to WHO, and the Doctor). The second wave of 1918 flu pandemic killed around 30M to 100M people from the 500M people infected.
There's two factors to flu virus : spread and severity. The last influenza pandemic may have been "overhyped" and exploited by pharma companies, but we were also lucky that it had high spread but relative low mortality rate.
The NCoV seems to have a high mortality rate. "Prevention is preferable to cure" (moreover when there isn't any cure ready yet).
They weren't overhyped. Your point is a common and old canard.
The worry wasn't that avian flu or the swine flu would kill a lot of people in their current states, but that they would mutate into something considerably more dangerous. The swine flu, for example, was known to spread easily but wasn't _yet_ very lethal. The avian flu (H5N1) didn't _yet_ spread easily, but was very lethal.
If the swine flu mutated into something more lethal or if the avian flu mutated into something more communicable, then everyone would probably know someone that died from either virus. And that's exactly the worry with these new crop of viruses, and why it's important to react with extraordinarily measures -- to prevent them from becoming something much worse.
I agree that they are a bit overhyped. The exclusion to that is places that do not have access to antibiotics. Even though the 1918 Flu had cytokine-storm-like effects, a large majority of people died of secondary infection, preventable with antibiotics. There is also a relatively small window of time going forward before we have decent universal vaccines.
That said, a lot of the work done to get us to where we are is a big part of why they are not as scary as the hype.
I wonder what the second/third order effects of eradicating bats would be. I remember the consequences of eradicating mosquitoes being pretty minor, but presumably no bats would mean more insects, which would raise the incidence of various insect diseases, but also might increase birds and other insectivores. I have no great love of bats themselves, particularly due to rabies.
As always the best offense is a good defense which in this case means keeping well informed of the spread of these diseases and staying away from people/places that have higher rates of infection.
[+] [-] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
I get a lot of my pandemic prevention information from the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy,
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/index.html
which, to be sure, has an institutional reason to raise awareness of risks of pandemics, but which also links to a lot of current, sound science reporting on infectious diseases.
Novel strains of the influenza viruses or novel strains of coronaviruses are scary to thoughtful epidemiologists because they can be spread by the everyday activity of breathing. If a new coronavirus infection has a high case mortality rate, high virulence, and long latency period, it could kill many people before any of us have a chance to practice the isolation that eventually shut down the spread of SARS back in 2003. Every year, a lot of people get the flu, and a more virulent and more lethal strain of flu--especially one for which current seasonal flu vaccines provide no immunity--could kill a lot of our friends and neighbors.
[+] [-] Lost_BiomedE|13 years ago|reply
We are likely to have a decent universal vaccine within the decade. Example, one test by Inovio used a unmatched vaccine on the 1918 Flu with lethal dose in mice. All the controls died but none of the vaccinated. This type of vaccine would reduce the chance greatly that something like a bat flu would emerge without us being prepared. These universal vaccines are made by bacteria or other very fast to produce and cheap methods, compared to the popular egg method today.
The biggest issue which the WHO has been working on is to make sure poorer countries have the know-how and distribution networks to ensure they can make and deliver current and next gen vaccines. This is especially important if access to antibiotics is not common and easy.
[+] [-] pygy_|13 years ago|reply
You're either preemptively addressing survivors, or you forgot to look in the mirror...
:-/
[+] [-] azakai|13 years ago|reply
Of course this isn't a reason to be complacent.
[+] [-] knowtheory|13 years ago|reply
Anyone who understands what the word "Pandemic" means should also understand that pandemic disease is an inevitability.
The question is what can we do as a society (or societies) to reduce transmission, mitigate the severity and treat the afflicted if possible. It's why Public Health is so important.
(And to be fair to the author, the piece doesn't seem to pick the super weird frame that the title of the piece does. As Mitt Romney pointed out during the election regarding his GM bailout piece, the authors don't write the article titles)
[+] [-] keyle|13 years ago|reply
Furthermore, click on the author's name and get taken to his personal website... Where you can admire his book being promoted. And it's about scary diseases in the world that will kill us all.
Please.
[+] [-] kaolinite|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f055|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hga|13 years ago|reply
Hong Kong Flu (1968–1969), "killed an estimated one million people worldwide." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_pandemic#Hong_Kong_Fl...
Asian Flu (1957–1958), "Estimates of worldwide deaths vary widely depending on source, ranging from 1 million to 4 million." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_pandemic#Asian_Flu_.2...
Spanish Flu (1918–1920), "It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—3 to 5 percent of the world's population at the time—making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history."
"Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill juvenile, elderly, or already weakened patients; in contrast the 1918 pandemic killed predominantly previously healthy young adults." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic
That was the big one, and if you talk to your elders they'll remember the first hand stories they heard about it. Few families escaped unscathed, I lost a great-uncle. A repeat would be catastrophic, and efforts to avoid it are not "overhyped", except by the always excitable media. To dismiss such a well documented, in living history threat as being "for the benefit of pharma companies" is beyond blind.
[+] [-] mixmax|13 years ago|reply
It's true that in any normal year more people die from known diseases, and that pandemics are a rare occurrence. But when they happen they kill a lot of people. The 1918 flu pandemic killed 100 million people. 1 out of 20 inhabitants on the planet. And remember that this was back when we didn't fly around the planet giving a virus the possibility of spreading to the entire globe within a few days.
That's why pandemics are so scary - when they kill they kill a sizable portion of the earths population.
[+] [-] FoeNyx|13 years ago|reply
There's two factors to flu virus : spread and severity. The last influenza pandemic may have been "overhyped" and exploited by pharma companies, but we were also lucky that it had high spread but relative low mortality rate.
The NCoV seems to have a high mortality rate. "Prevention is preferable to cure" (moreover when there isn't any cure ready yet).
[+] [-] FollowSteph3|13 years ago|reply
The following articles I wrote explains a lot more of the details of what influenza is and why people wrongly think it was over hyped http://www.followsteph.com/2009/10/29/its-only-the-flu/
[+] [-] josh-j|13 years ago|reply
The worry wasn't that avian flu or the swine flu would kill a lot of people in their current states, but that they would mutate into something considerably more dangerous. The swine flu, for example, was known to spread easily but wasn't _yet_ very lethal. The avian flu (H5N1) didn't _yet_ spread easily, but was very lethal.
If the swine flu mutated into something more lethal or if the avian flu mutated into something more communicable, then everyone would probably know someone that died from either virus. And that's exactly the worry with these new crop of viruses, and why it's important to react with extraordinarily measures -- to prevent them from becoming something much worse.
[+] [-] Lost_BiomedE|13 years ago|reply
That said, a lot of the work done to get us to where we are is a big part of why they are not as scary as the hype.
[+] [-] nodata|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vxNsr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sn0v|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austengary|13 years ago|reply