Turn on the news.
Oct. 14th, 2005 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zotzGood.
Also good.
I've also been trying to think about this 'flu we're all going to die of. The prevailing view seems to be that we have a disaster looming over us. I wonder whether that's true - or, rather, whether it's particularly truer than it's been every day for the last few decades.
We can, of course, now easily identify particular strains, and so there's a perception that there now are particularly dangerous ones. Some years ago there wasn't such a perception because it wasn't practical to genotype every suspicious-looking outbreak. Does this necessarily mean, though, that there are more such strains than there were?
It's possible that potentially dangerous strains are arising at a higher rate than before, and certainly better communications allow infections to spread faster, but this isn't like a stressed tectonic fault gradually building up tension - there's no reason to think that the next 'flu pandemic will be a lethal as the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, rather than the 1957 Asian Flu or the 1968 Hong Kong Flu pandemics. Indeed, going by that timing they would seem to be one-in-thirtysomething-year events, with no particular reason to fear it in any particular year. After all, the lack of cross-immunity to antigenically-shifted strains would imply great randomness in timing rather than them being affected by post-pandemic declines in herd immunity.
Having said that, the upshot of the situation is that rather than this being a brief scare, we should probably be looking to maintain this level of alertness, given that we're probably on the verge of actually being able to do something about such an outbreak while it's still happening.
Gaa. Whatever.
Also good.
I've also been trying to think about this 'flu we're all going to die of. The prevailing view seems to be that we have a disaster looming over us. I wonder whether that's true - or, rather, whether it's particularly truer than it's been every day for the last few decades.
We can, of course, now easily identify particular strains, and so there's a perception that there now are particularly dangerous ones. Some years ago there wasn't such a perception because it wasn't practical to genotype every suspicious-looking outbreak. Does this necessarily mean, though, that there are more such strains than there were?
It's possible that potentially dangerous strains are arising at a higher rate than before, and certainly better communications allow infections to spread faster, but this isn't like a stressed tectonic fault gradually building up tension - there's no reason to think that the next 'flu pandemic will be a lethal as the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, rather than the 1957 Asian Flu or the 1968 Hong Kong Flu pandemics. Indeed, going by that timing they would seem to be one-in-thirtysomething-year events, with no particular reason to fear it in any particular year. After all, the lack of cross-immunity to antigenically-shifted strains would imply great randomness in timing rather than them being affected by post-pandemic declines in herd immunity.
Having said that, the upshot of the situation is that rather than this being a brief scare, we should probably be looking to maintain this level of alertness, given that we're probably on the verge of actually being able to do something about such an outbreak while it's still happening.
Gaa. Whatever.
