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Piggy Influenza (Summary in OP)
Posts
The information filtering through to the public is information that means jack and shit from a technical perspective, and is also kind of weirdly patchy. We were fed the 60/1000 figures for Mexico from early Friday all the way into this Sunday morning, when they updated them to ... 80/1300 (or thereabouts, estimates are starting to get all over the fucking bullshitty place). Jumping from 'high mortality rate among the young' (they are using aged older than 5 and lesser than 60 as 'young,' by the way) to oh no, it must be cytokine storms is doubly premature because it's not something detectable without intense laboratory scrutiny, and also because the human physiological condition has changed in some profound ways with the advance of modern medicine. Whether the widespread immune response issues of 1918 even could be repeated in modern, 1st-world nations is a contested issue.
Obviously we should just all massively irradiate our bodies to make ourselves immunocompromised. It's the only safe thing.
Tss... HIV shots are easier to acquire.
Is M. Night Shamalalalan pulling the strings?
I'm just waiting for the conservative talking-heads to say Obama has been doing too much/too little in response to this "crisis."
The armchair science from Republicans is always humorous. See: Boehner & cow farts and Michelle Bachman & CO2.
Which are both pretty much bullshit... World Health Organization doesn't know how a flu virus spreads, really? Stupid asshole newspapers. Freedom of speech = lie blatantly and make up things and then call them "quotes" from experts.
Astraphobia: Please don't remind me. It hurts my brain to think that those people are anywhere near positions of power.
I pronounce it bee-log.
Hey! Don't piss on the repubs. After all, what is further down south from Mexico? That's right, Venezuela is. So Mexico is between Venezuela and the US - if you go from Venezuela to the US you'll pass through Mexico! And who did Obama shake hands with lovingly last week? That's right, Latino Stalin Chavez...
Do you seriously not see the socialist plot of mass destruction?
But hey, at least we are all in agreement! Too soon to know anything ... and thusly, time for more Pokemon. 8-)
Pokemans are like flu strains... Gotta catch 'em all!
and every year a new version come out.
That's not enough fearmongering!
End of days, Umbrella Corp., Raccoon City, etc.
I pronounce it bee-log.
Oh, come on. If you want to do that, you have to blame it on gay marriage.
We all know how to find wikipedia.
We have a flu that is killing healthy young adults.
Cytokine storms have, in past pandemic flus, been responsible for killing young, healthy adults.
If young, healthy adults are in fact dying in unusually high numbers, then a cytokine storm is a very likely reason for this. I don't think this is a terribly unreasonable assumption to make, and of course this is early days yet, so little is known about this bug.
or more statistics in general
at all
about any of this
seriously I hope the weekday news cycles bring something better than the dick-waving the weekend got us.
No age break downs yet, but lots of info by country, back ground info, influenza and virus information in general. And if/when more detailed statistics are released they'll probably show up on this page. They've even got a map!
The outbreak pattern stopped being interesting when it was a given that it was going to spread across the world, and that was Saturday. :wink:
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
Cool, I'm going to update the OP, I'll put this on there.
No, I don't know how a cytokine storm operates in a host, why would I? I made this thread because I wanted a central place to collect and disseminate information with other people. I don't know jack shit about whats actually going on, I'm just putting relevant information out there so I (we) can keep track of whats going on. If you're going to criticize me you might as well accuse me of fear mongering, its more topical (and was one of the recommended discussion points!).
There are some problems with this. The first is the question of if the virus is spreading person to person, or if there is some other particular route of transmission such as from an animal source (EG the original pig host) to human. In one case, if it can spread person to person you have a considerably bigger problem than if the virus spreads from a pig to a human host, but not between people. Pathogenic influenza viruses (really nasty ones) often kill people because they are mutated in such a way they bind to receptors in the lung much further down the respiratory tract. This ensures that the virus is much more dangerous than if it was further up the respiratory tract, but means that the virus has a really tough time getting back out of the host again. This isn't the only reason for potential pathogenicity though. The 1918 spanish flu virus had a mutation in its polymerase and was otherwise similar to other viruses at the time in its haemagglutinin and neuraminidase.
I don't believe it's probably easily spreading from person to person at this stage, but it is a concerning virus because if it can get into people it can meet human influenza viruses. If it can meet human influenza viruses, they can have a "chat" and perhaps switch some genes.
Then we have a problem.
Edit: Anyone outside of Mexico, obviously.
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
About 5 newspapers, and the ghost of journalism got a bit of a flogging.
Not necessarily. Influenza viruses have extremely high rates of mutations within their receptors. From a study I did last year, I found there were often 6-8 different point mutations strung out between different strains of influenza from the US. Although not all point mutations lead to different amino acids, where they did the predicted structure that I came up with was going to be considerably different. Such changes in structure can obliterate antibody binding sites and effectively disguise the virus.
Additionally, there was already a paper published recently on this virus from the CDC examining 2 cases in California*. The CDC study indicates that the current flu vaccine might not be effective and they speculated on person to person transmission, because they couldn't determine any contact with pigs for the two cases. This is what has the CDC and WHO worried. Sequencing of the viral genome is being done at the moment, so I am curious to see how it will stack up with the vaccine strain and other circulating influenza strains.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Swine Influenza A (H1N1) infection in two children--Southern California, March-April 2009. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2009 Apr 24;58(15):400-2.
Perfect.
So, I'm updating the OP so that it can be a one stop "what the fuck is going on" summary. Can I get some input from you guys? Mostly directed at you FCC as well as Toad.
Key questions:
Swine flu? H1N1? Influenza? Pandemic? Cytokine storm? We should probably have some definitions.
Where/when did it start? The media got a hold of it in its current form on friday, but people started catching this in mexico and possibly the US a couple weeks (if not longer) ago.
Am I in danger? Should I not travel? Should I stock up on food for the population decline? I think "use common sense, and listen (exclusively if need be) to public health officials (ie CDC, WHO).
I don't feel like updating it more than a couple times, so info that will remain good, and links to sources of info are what I'll be including.
Ba-zing!
But yeah, nobody.