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.
Re:Hungry for breakfast . . . (Score:0, Insightful)
Waffles > pancakes
Re:why just schools? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
Re:What's the point? (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.
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.
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.
Re:What's the point? (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 flu isn't any more deadly than your garden variety seasonal flu.
Re:I really don't understand (Score:1, Insightful)
Sure, the seasonal flu is deadly, but we know who it is deadly to and how to prevent and treat it.
Then why do we have 36,000 people a year dying from it? That's a hundred people a day (on average).
We know that the primary mechanism of flu transmission is sneezing but then we go ahead and pack hundreds of people in these narrow tubes for hours at a time (air travel).
Why don't we do something about this? As it is, if you tried to wear a face mask on a plane, you'd probably end up in Guantanamo. But what if airlines actually encouraged people to wear face masks? What if airlines handed out free face masks?
So, face masks tend to be a bit stuffy. Well, you know how some planes had those nozzles of air you could aim at yourself. What if instead the planes had nozzles of virus-free air that you could hook a face mask up to (like the jacks to plug a headphone set into). You could blow enough air through the mask to keep the humidity down and make it nice and comfortable.
The technology exists to virtually eliminate flu transmission on airplanes - but somehow the political/cultural will just isn't there to make it happen.
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:A fool's errand (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.
Re:why just schools? (Score:4, Insightful)
Expand to the stars, problem solved.
Re:I really don't understand (Score:2, Insightful)
Who do you think those numbers are for? They aren't intended for the layman. They are for other health agencies and governments. It's like the richter scale or the meteor destruction scale - yes, the bigger numbers are scarier, and the news media loves reporting them, but most people have no fucking clue what they mean.
It's not like the Security alert colors - there are actual criteria used in determining the pandemic level. and they were designed to let health officials make plans and then translate that into action on a regional basis, not "Level 4 means tape up the windows."
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:This is H1N1 (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 is having a big laugh.
Re:A fool's errand (Score:2, Insightful)
Good think you're not unionized then.
How's that free, unfettered market working out for you now, eh? You'll get no sympathies from anyone, mule.
Lots of rocketships (Score:3, Insightful)