Flu Models Predict Pandemic, But Flu Chips Ready 216
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.
Revelance to summary. (Score:5, Informative)
No big deal... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What's the point? (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
Re:I really don't understand (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:why just schools? (Score:3, Informative)
uhm no. You did not Godwin the previous poster. You did it to yourself.
Re:Models (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).
Re:why just schools? (Score:2, Informative)
You know, this has all happened before. What's the worst that can happen ?
Well this is what happened last time : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu [wikipedia.org]
In short : 1/20 of the people who were infected died of the infection. This is a number that is too simplified : just about every baby infected died, as did just about every infected person over 75. Least affected were people between 5 and 20 years old.
Worldwide, the pandemic killed about 1% of the population. This totaled about 100 million people. The number is not well known since many hard-hit regions did not have data available : e.g. both the ottoman empire itself, and it's many enslaved populations went nearly totally unaccounted, it is quite certain that tons of black slaves of the muslims died totally untreated, and their numbers are not accounted for at all.
Just about every system in existence, whether related to health care or not was either abandoned or swamped. Entire factories were converted into hospitals, and basically nothing of the economy was operational. Trade, sea travel, ... all worked at severely diminished capacities. Hospitals emptied of docters and nurses, since they very quickly either ran, or became infected and sick themselves.
The pattern was similar to what were seeing today. The virus is present in one form of another in humans and a variety of animals, mainly chickens, monkeys of various species, pigs, goats and sheep. The pandemic was not a single virus but several similarly mutated forms of what is thought to have originated from a single strand. There were "warning" epidemics that started, but failed to cause the disaster the eventual strain caused, like we've seen today with the various small bird flew infections, the slightly bigger epidemics in malaysia and indonesia, and now the mexican outbreak.
Attacking these animals makes no sense, since the same pattern was observed then, and now : the dangerous strain jumped ONCE from animal to human (presumably ... it is also possible the virus mutated inside humans) and then only from human to human. If you want to prevent the infection from getting into a specific region, it's humans you need to worry about (e.g. an American military commander isolated Samoa using military force, which was spared the epidemic)
Please note that while we are capable of testing for the surface proteins of a virus (H1 is such a protein N1 is another) there are dozens of strains with the same surface features. It takes VERY expensive and time consuming tests to determine exactly which strain a patient has, and is rarely done at all, since there is no difference in treatment (despite all our medical knowledge, treatment for a virus infection is basically to make the patient comfortable and make sure he eats healthy).
Because of these limitations, there is very little information known about which strains and which genes were involved in causing the pandemic, and we have no data whatsoever about which genes went to which geographical regions.
Re:why just schools? (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 on the WHO.
Re:I really don't understand (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, the seasonal flu is deadly, but we know who it is deadly to and how to prevent and treat it. We don't with this swine flu plus the swine flu could easily mutate come this fall in time for an even deadlier flu season.
Re:Here's some points.. (Score:2, Informative)
To get 2%, you took 4% (mortality in confirmed cases) or 6% (mortality in suspected cases) and divided by two or three to get 2%. I don't think that's reasonable, because it assumes that people who died from swine flu when those numbers were being collected were only twice as likely to be tested for it as the average person who got it. You could just as reasonably assume that someone who died from swine flu was 100 times as likely to be tested for it. After all,
So why not cut the 4% mortality rate in confirmed cases and divide it by fifty? Or one hundred? Or maybe, for some reason we don't understand, the proper divisor is one, and 4% is actually a reasonable estimate for overall mortality? Unless you want to flash some credentials, I'm going to assume your guess isn't any better than mine.
You would expect that people wouldn't throw around these numbers (like 12 out of 312) unless they meant something, but experience shows that people WILL throw around whatever numbers they have, even if they don't mean anything.
Re:What's the point? (Score:1, Informative)
omg, antibiotics don't work against viruses. i thought that was common knowledge by now.
Re:This is H1N1 (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:This is H1N1 (Score:2, Informative)
While that may have helped with the secondary bacterial infections like pneumonia, antibiotics have no effect on the flu virus which also led to many of the deaths.