Re: OT Bush says Bird Flu might get military quarantine of effected areas.

blart wrote:
The quarantine will be brutal, and will excise large areas and all exit vectors quickly.
Once avian flu xenomorphs into humans it will kill over 60% of people it infects initially, then the death rate will grow as medical infrastructure and other societal needs melt down - people can and will die of perfectly treatable ailments such as secondary bacterial infections, starvation and gunshot.

Expect that the rich and well connected to have enough anti-virals to protect them and their private armies.
All others will have to rely on luck, natural immunity and fleet feet to avoid death squads whilst looking for food.

expect blackwater fever, typhus, typhoid and dysentry to clean up more people

do not expect medical insurance to be of help
do not expect government to help anyone other than themselves, and 'their kind of people'

farfetched?

katrina and rita say Hi!


you'll note that there was only one minor outbreak of Norovirus in the Gulf Coast region that quickly burned itself out, as well as scattered E. Coli outbreaks (that only last for a few days anyway) in a couple shelters. That's all.

Not too shabby at all for one of the largest, if not the largest, evacuations in American history.

You'll also note that SARS burned itself out very rapidly, even though it had a very similar etiology and propagation pattern to the hypothetical "killer virus".

In this age of instant communication, it's so much easier for local health officials to keep in touch with (and call in the support of) the worldwide epidemiology community that it's very doubtful such a virus could spread far enough in a short enough period of time before somebody noticed something funny.

Which is not to say thaty it can't happen, but the virus would have to have *extremely* slow onset (so infected humans come into contact with many people before they show symptoms, then those people infect others before they get sick, etc.), *extremely* efficient person-to-person transmission, *extreme* stability (so the virus remains viable and does not rapidly mutate into something that can't hurt humans), etc.

Any one of those factors would seriously limit the ability of the virus to spread over a large area/population. Either it's so unstable that it mutates into nonviability in humans just as fast as it mutated into lethality, or the onset of symptoms is fast enough that it's easy to see a pattern developing and quarantine infected patients (as happened with SARS), or the virus is lethal but just doesn't "hop" from person to person fast enough to cause more than sporadic cases.

Moral of the story: the public health infrastructure in the world today is infinitely more advanced than it was during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918, or during the plague outbreaks through history. We know a lot more about how diseases spread, we know a lot more about how to contain them, and we have a much more robust and effective world communication grid to help news of the problem disseminate. All that makes it much less likely that millions of people would die from teh same new virus.

What's more likely is that a new, uncurable virus *will* emerge at some point (no way around that), but that the damage will be quickly limited to small "reservoirs" of dying humans, who will be very quickly quarantined until the virus can burn itself out.



--
Terrell Miller
millerto@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Suddenly, after nearly 30 years of scorn, Prog is cool again".
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