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Flu Models Predict Pandemic, But Flu Chips Ready
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri May 01, 2009 04:08 PM
from the false-positives-incoming dept.
from the false-positives-incoming dept.
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.
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Science: WHO Raises Swine Flu Threat Level 557 comments
Solarch writes "Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, the WHO raised the pandemic threat level for H1N1 "swine flu" to 5. Global media outlets(such as CNN, Fox News, and the BBC) preempted normal broadcast coverage and immediately published stories on their websites. To clarify, the WHO's elevation is mainly a sign to governments that the virus is spreading quickly and that steps should be taken on a governmental level to stage supplies and medicines to combat a possible pandemic. Unfortunately, broadcast coverage focused on phrases like 'pandemic imminent' (CNN marquee).
In other news, patient zero, the medical term for the initial human vector of a disease, has been tentatively identified in Mexico."
[+]
Entertainment: Let's Rename Swine Flu As "Colbert Flu" 607 comments
Bruce Perens writes "The World Health Organization will no longer refer to Virus A(H1N1) as 'Swine Flu,' citing ethnic reactions to 'swine,' for example among middle-eastern cultures who feel that swine are unclean. Or, is it because meat packers are concerned that people might stop eating pork in fear of the virus? WHO suggests that the public select a new name for the virus. I suggest that we all start calling it The Colbert Flu, after the comedian and fake pundit who asked his audience to stuff a NASA poll so that a Space Station module would be named after him. What can we do to make the name stick?"
Submission: Flu models predict pandemic, but flu chips ready by Anonymous Coward
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Hungry for breakfast . . . (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hungry for breakfast . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Pans.
You cook bacon and eggs in pans, dipshit.
Make Money Fast! (Score:2, Insightful)
"Veratect, based in Kirkland, Wash..."
"The company...has tried unsuccessfully to sell its service to the CDC"
"Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., who talked with the CDC, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies..said the federal government had made a mistake in not purchasing the company's program"
I think there's a "Dicks for Sale" joke in there somewhere.
What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
While we delay the spread, we can learn more about the disease and maybe produce a vaccine.
Parent
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
100 cases and 1 death don't give us a 1% fatality rate... we have to make sure those 100 people recover.
100 cases and 1 death don't give us a 1% fatality rate, because we have to take into account the people who got sick and didn't seek medical attention.
Anyway, where do you get those numbers? I thought the latest word was that it might not be any more fatal or infectious than normal. And since nobody has told me what the original fear of high mortality was based on (unless it was the 12 dead out of 312 confirmed cases in Mexico, a terrible statistic to base a mortality estimate on) I'm not inclined to buy into it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I also am skeptical of the current claims about the infectious rate and the death rate. I was watching on t.v. (take with a grain of salt) a scientist here in Ontario who pointed out that given what we know about the virus' virulence there may have been one- or two hundred thousand cases of this flu by now in Mexico, that have simply gone unreported because people haven't gotten sick enough to go to the hospital. If that's the case, and if we can believe the current figure on deaths out of Mexico, then this
The first wave (Score:3, Insightful)
In the 1918 pandemic [wikipedia.org] the world was swept by a mild version [cdc.gov] 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 [wikipedia.org].
But don't panic.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So wouldn't it be great if the spread was halted long enough for a vaccine for this new strain to be developed?
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Informative)
The point is to delay the spread so that infections don't happen all at once and overwhelm the health system. See this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/health/30contain.html
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That is an excellent answer and the first sane article I've read about the issue.
Still, I'm not convinced it's worth it. What's the maximum N for which we should keep N thousand students out of school for a month to save a life? We're leaving it up to somebody to answer that question for us. Who is it?
A fool's errand (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Easy for you to say. Regardless the "protection" I have in place via the Family and Medical Leave Act [dol.gov], my boss will make sure I am unemployed if I don't work like a rented mule.
Do NOT give me the "Then get another job" speech. I don't have the income to support the family I have without a job more than a month. I refuse to gamble with the well being of my family. Right or wrong, that is the situation, and I am not even close to the only person in this position.
Resistance is futile (Score:5, Insightful)
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..
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You are correct. However, people don't get fired if they do something.
Scenario 1: A school closes down, then weeks later they get the swine flu. Well, the school can say they did what they could.
Scenario 2: A school doesn't close down and they get the swine flu. Complaints will flow in from angry parents about why the didn't *do* something. Heads could roll, etc.
This is H1N1 (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
H1N1 is the most common type of human influenza. It causes a large proportional of seasonal flu illnesses. It happens to include both Spanish Flu and this new strain, as well as milder forms.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It may only be dumb luck that is separating us from a killer of 10s of millions.
Or it may be math. The prestrain has to infect a huge quantity of people so that it can get reproduction events up to a high enough number that an improbable critical evil mutation becomes likely. Because if you roll the dice enough times...
BTW, there are 6 times as many humans as there were then so it has to 12% as infectious or at infectious parity the evil mutation is 36 times more likely. We move around about 100 times as much so... yeah, we've got about six weeks.
Somewhere in here Reverend Malthus
I'm not worried. (Score:3, Funny)
I've already read World War Z [wikipedia.org], so I'm not worried -- I'm prepared.
You don't have to reload a blade.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't have to reload a blade.
Yes, but after only a few uses of a blade, it will start to chip and break, and if you don't clean the blood off of it right away, it will make some serious pits in the metal.
A blade is a good thing to have, but should never be used as a primary weapon. Depending on the type of zombies you're facing, you may not even want them within your blade's reach (think of Boomers from Left 4 Dead, or other zombies where bodily fluid contact is a very bad thing).
Fear Mongering for Sales? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Fear Mongering for Sales? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even better, the blog author's "source" is the article on EETimes written by ...the blog author.
Parent
Revelance to summary. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Revelance to summary. (Score:5, Informative)
First link seems like astroturfing. A better link would of been [NDSSL @ Virgina Tech], where the research is being done.
Have.
Fucking HAVE.
Parent
No big deal... (Score:4, Informative)
I really don't understand (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I really don't understand (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:I really don't understand (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but the problem with that is that the actual mortality rate from the epicenter of this "epidemic" is going down as better information comes out. It seems like we got an anti-sars. We got a flood of bad information but openly presented.
Parent
Rolan P. is the Undead!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Three steps to profit (Score:4, Funny)
2. Wait for a disaster
3. Shout from the roof top, "I warned! I warned!!".
4. ...
5. Profit!
Flu Chips? (Score:3, Funny)
Thanks for the hype, moron (Score:5, Informative)
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.
soooo hot (Score:4, Funny)
2009 H1N1 flu virus
Colloquially known as the heinie virus of 2009.
Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
Source, please? Otherwise it's just more overblown panic-inducing hype. Neither the linked article, or the article it links to say this. In fact, the second article says "So far, we haven't even identified the incubation period or how long people are infectious," and if that's the case I don't see how any computer model could be accurate.
Headline... (Score:5, Funny)
Cluster Computer Predicts Cluster Fuck For Clustered People.
Film at 11.
My Plan (Score:5, Funny)
Is a pandemic really something to be worried about (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:why just schools? (Score:5, Funny)
Children are good carriers. Kill the children, it's the only way for humanity to survive.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:why just schools? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
uhm no. You did not Godwin the previous poster. You did it to yourself.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Just a nitpick, but I really don't think you really can compare present disease with past disease like smallpox. We eradicated smallpox with vaccines, but that was before Wakefield's Epic Trolling and the fears that mercury/aluminum/formaldehyde/anything and everything in vaccines causes autism/cancer/AIDS/diabetes/criminal behavior (I shit you not, I once read something that claimed vaccines cause criminal behavior). If you were to try a widespread vaccination program today, like the one the WHO used to
Re:why just schools? (Score:4, Insightful)
Expand to the stars, problem solved.
Parent
Lots of rocketships (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:why just schools? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:why just schools? (Score:4, Funny)
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)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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).