I have a feeling this particular instance is more likely than not round of Flu Panic '0X! but it does seem pretty inevitable that we're going to get hit and hit hard with something nasty eventually. We keep interconnecting more and more of the remote, god forsaken corners of the earth where conditions are obscene and these things can breed but we aren't doing a comparable amount to curtain spread or improve conditions.
Yeah. Fucking America with their 65000 massive pig farms with $14 billion in annual profit.
I fucking hate it when sick people come in and get the entire office sick.
Well, it depends on what your definition of "sick" is, I guess. If you think people should stay home every time they get a runny nose or feel a little woozy, you're asking a whole lot of people to forego weeks of work and thousands of dollars in pay, which isn't exactly reasonable. If I come in to work with a cold and I take some common-sense precautions, nobody else is going to get sick.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
The thing I don't understand about the flu scares is: what am I supposed to do? Like, I'll try to avoid licking my hands after sticking them in urinals I guess, but at what point can I do anything productive in response to the warning "There may be a flu pandemic!". I got my shot, stop yelling.
You're supposed to panic, and then willingly give away your rights, freedoms and more of your tax dollars to the government. This is only after the media has sufficiently contributed to the hysteria in an effort to generate as much revenue as possible.
Marketing is also important. This is the nefarious SWINE FLU. Not to be confused with cute little piggy flu.
Apparently there have been over 1000 confirmed cases in a single day? Or something?
With a 10% mortality rate?
Or is this heresy?
"Hearsay."
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
The thing I don't understand about the flu scares is: what am I supposed to do? Like, I'll try to avoid licking my hands after sticking them in urinals I guess, but at what point can I do anything productive in response to the warning "There may be a flu pandemic!". I got my shot, stop yelling.
You're supposed to panic, and then willingly give away your rights, freedoms and more of your tax dollars to the government. This is only after the media has sufficiently contributed to the hysteria in an effort to generate as much revenue as possible.
Marketing is also important. This is the nefarious SWINE FLU. Not to be confused with cute little piggy flu.
Calling any pig disease "swine (something)" is pretty common, try again.
As for "hysteria"- sure, some of it is. And how many of those have resulted in anything you name? Very few.
As for tax dollars, I'm thinking spending a little money to prevent a pandemic is a Good Thing, with a very large return on the money. Remember that the 1918 flu outbreak killed more than WW1. We spend trillions on preventing war; spending billions on stopping disease that kills MORE isn't a bad idea.
I fear suffering the media panic more than the risk of actually getting the disease. Is that bad? I'm just so damn sick of the fear mongering losers on TV.
This disease will reach pandemic levels when pigs fly.
MOI-OINK?!
Not sure how many people will understand your spoiler. But you got him there.
Also, the US is full of pig farms. If those farms are hit, that means no more bacon!
Grayjack72 on
0
DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
Apparently there have been over 1000 confirmed cases in a single day? Or something?
With a 10% mortality rate?
Or is this heresy?
The numbers are all very new. I highly doubt that only 1000 people have been infected. Wait at least a few more days, then we can start putting a bit more stock in the numbers we've been getting.
Apparently there have been over 1000 confirmed cases in a single day? Or something?
With a 10% mortality rate?
Or is this heresy?
The numbers are all very new. I highly doubt that only 1000 people have been infected. Wait at least a few more days, then we can start putting a bit more stock in the numbers we've been getting.
More accurately, it's impossible for there to be 1000 confirmed cases right now. The protocols aren't in place yet to enable that level of insight. For purposes of local confirmation, positive strain sets need to be collated before they can even start testing; it would take weeks to get 1000 confirmations with the methods that they are using right now. Now that they've identified that this is a consistent strain, however, they're (God-willing) already preparing and distributing local testing materials. The next few days should be very exciting, but it's also incredibly unlikely we could see a number in the thousands except from maybe in Mexico City itself, if they put full disaster protocols into play, and if we did see a number in the thousands particular to this strain, in those 48 hours and retrospective, in Mexico City, that'd be pretty catastrophic.
The thing I don't understand about the flu scares is: what am I supposed to do? Like, I'll try to avoid licking my hands after sticking them in urinals I guess, but at what point can I do anything productive in response to the warning "There may be a flu pandemic!". I got my shot, stop yelling.
You're supposed to panic, and then willingly give away your rights, freedoms and more of your tax dollars to the government. This is only after the media has sufficiently contributed to the hysteria in an effort to generate as much revenue as possible.
Marketing is also important. This is the nefarious SWINE FLU. Not to be confused with cute little piggy flu.
Oh you're absolutely going to hate your life when a plausibly contagious outbreak hits a US city. Because while many people - liberals, even - will protest excessive government power on civil rights or taxes, polling shows that most people support whatever recommendations public health officials dole out. Even if it's quarantine, i.e., locking people in their homes at the command of a doctor.
Because even in completely a-liberal places like Singapore or the PRC, experience has demonstrated that even with 24 hour video monitoring and electronic tagging, someone's going to break quarantine and see nothing wrong about doing so, thereby adding a few hundred more people to the quarantine list.
AFAIK there aren't any libertarian approaches to disease control beyond denying that sufficiently deadly and contagious diseases exist... care to suggest any?
ronya on
0
DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
I have a feeling this particular instance is more likely than not round of Flu Panic '0X! but it does seem pretty inevitable that we're going to get hit and hit hard with something nasty eventually. We keep interconnecting more and more of the remote, god forsaken corners of the earth where conditions are obscene and these things can breed but we aren't doing a comparable amount to curtain spread or improve conditions.
Yeah. Fucking America with their 65000 massive pig farms with $14 billion in annual profit.
Seriously. I have a hard time believeing that these pig flu can't come from America because you have some sense of self righteousness for America.
These flu's are very much grown in the middle of america not "remote, god forsaken corners of the earth"
I think this deserves attention, although so far high-intensity agriculture has mostly bred nasty nasty strains of gastric diseases.
IIRC though, bird flu in China was linked to chicken farms as much as natural populations. Rule of thumb: squashing a whole lot of critters into one space and then stressing their immune systems like crazy is a baaaaaad idea.
I fucking hate it when sick people come in and get the entire office sick.
Well, it depends on what your definition of "sick" is, I guess. If you think people should stay home every time they get a runny nose or feel a little woozy, you're asking a whole lot of people to forego weeks of work and thousands of dollars in pay, which isn't exactly reasonable. If I come in to work with a cold and I take some common-sense precautions, nobody else is going to get sick.
runny nose is a cold. Coughing, sneezing and at rare times, explosive diarrhea is the flu which is what we're talking about.
Now for "forgoing thousands of dollars in pay", you've got sick days, everyone's got sick days, in fact I'm pretty sure even the Chinese have sick days. Taking the three or four days off isn't going to cost you anything.
And if you're working in an office, you're going to spread it. It's air borne, so it doesn't matter if you wash hands with bleach every five seconds, you're going to spread it in to the air and it will circulate.
The fever occurs in the latter phases of the flu. The flu is, technically, at its most virulent before the immune response (and accordingly, fever) actually kick in. When you're just sneezing and blowing your nose, even infrequently? When you think "eh it's just a cold," and go into work anyway? Yeah, granted, this is usually a window of probably one day, possibly two, with influenza, but it's still something some folks do and it really is the time it's most* virulent.
* - This isn't true in practice because of how readily Influenzavirus A recombines. In the course of a single infection in a single host, its virulence will oscillate more than the expected statistical decline of transmissibility from immune response/sick syndrome.
The US Center for Disease Control has said that containment probably isn't going to be possible. Its already been found in two states, among people that are not all connected to each other. These people have probably been infecting others for a couple days now. In Mexico where the numbers are already in the thousands, seems like we're going to see pretty big jumps in the numbers over the weekend unless this somehow magically blows over.
[Tycho?] on
0
KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
edited April 2009
Captain Tripps is here! Kareem Abdul Jabar is coming for you!
Are there standard models that predict what set of events (e.g. unconnected infected, human-to-human transmission) correspond to what probabilities of this getting serious?
In other words, what are we now watching for in terms of evidence that this is serious or will blow over?
Are there standard models that predict what set of events (e.g. unconnected infected, human-to-human transmission) correspond to what probabilities of this getting serious?
In other words, what are we now watching for in terms of evidence that this is serious or will blow over?
Or are we just completely in the dark?
The WHO probably has stuff like that, they, as the title says are "very, very concerned".
But I don't know. I haven't heard anything about quarantine yet, and so much of this is still unknown.
Are there standard models that predict what set of events (e.g. unconnected infected, human-to-human transmission) correspond to what probabilities of this getting serious?
In other words, what are we now watching for in terms of evidence that this is serious or will blow over?
Or are we just completely in the dark?
We're watching for the full palette of symptoms observed in those confirmed to be suffering from this strain to see if the cytokine storm component of H1N1 -- the largest factor in its being a threat to the young and healthy, and being among the strains with the highest historic mortality rates -- is present in this modern variant. Laboratory scrutiny on the course of the strain that we now see as latent will give us key facts about the mortality of this strain.
On the subject of transmission factor, we're going to probably move forward with no use from any information we already have. This is a summer flu coinciding with the allergy season in many regions; even if people were in the second phase [of the four usually noted: incubating, pre-immune, rising, and falling], they're probably not going to the doctor because conventional wisdom is that "it's just the changing weather" or "it's just allergies." The symptoms with high specificity, that non flu-sufferers are not experiencing, only come as you hit the last two phases.
Incubation is generally 1 - 3 days. Length of symptoms prior to the symptoms accompanying immune response run the gamut from 1 - 4 days. Longer incubation periods are usually associated with a slower immune response that plateaus more sharply: e.g., for the H1N1 highly-pathogenic strains that provoke pneumonia in the weak and cytokine storms in the healthy, you get a long incubation and a long period of "this is probably just a cold," and then an intense immune response which will run its course fairly quickly.
We could have an entire weeks' worth of worldwide nascent highly-pathogenic H1N1 based on what we've seen. There's nothing that excludes this, but technically also nothing yet which demonstrates it. Influenza outbreaks, however, are notoriously hard to predict, and are marked by having lower rates of transmissibility than raw numbers might suggest; it's human habits, and especially in the second phase when transmission is most likely but the flu-specific symptoms have not yet arisen, that propagate it so far by iterating the fractal pattern, instead of creating very large fractals.
The tl;dr is that it's too soon to say anything definitive about how bad this is going to be, but we technically have nothing which excludes the worst-case scenario. As we move forward, that's what's going to be revealed first -- not the extent of how bad this likely will be, but what's the worst that could happen. That's not always fearmongering, it's just the way that the information gets revealed.
Are there standard models that predict what set of events (e.g. unconnected infected, human-to-human transmission) correspond to what probabilities of this getting serious?
In other words, what are we now watching for in terms of evidence that this is serious or will blow over?
Or are we just completely in the dark?
There absolutely are such models. I once spent a frightening road trip with an Army Captain who specialized in the alphabet soup warfare stuff (NBCR). That was years ago and it's not like we discussed equations on the road trip, but such things definitely do exist.
However we are almost entirely in the dark since we're just some blokes on the internet.
Rural regions suffer greater degradation in impact based on distance from the locus than urban regions. The "southwest US" has a lot of dead space, so I'm going to consider it a rural region. :P
We don't know if the locus is actually in Mexico yet, though with few notable exceptions we should hope that it is. Even assuming that, I don't know enough about livestock to really say if the southwest US would be boned more than any other region in the Americas with a comparable population density (and large reservoirs, with some airports in the southwest being major hubs). I also don't know what the ultimate effect of the claim to swine-bird-human hybridization being ... though as human-to-human transmission continues, those interspecies liabilities (rehybridization and reservoir populations in domestic animals, mostly, I think) become less important anyway.
Delicious Toad! on
0
KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
When would Mexico City/Mexico the country/other entities start to put quarantine measures into place? Travel restrictions, individual quarantine, closing borders and the like. There are surely guidelines to follow on these issues, Toad, any idea on what they are, and what we can expect to see in Mexico and the US?
Seems like if you'd want the borders closing to have any effect, it needs to happen yesterday. Is doing so a diplomatic no no, or is it considered acceptable?
Rural regions suffer greater degradation in impact based on distance from the locus than urban regions. The "southwest US" has a lot of dead space, so I'm going to consider it a rural region. :P
We don't know if the locus is actually in Mexico yet, though with few notable exceptions we should hope that it is. Even assuming that, I don't know enough about livestock to really say if the southwest US would be boned more than any other region in the Americas with a comparable population density (and large reservoirs, with some airports in the southwest being major hubs). I also don't know what the ultimate effect of the claim to swine-bird-human hybridization being ... though as human-to-human transmission continues, those interspecies liabilities (rehybridization and reservoir populations in domestic animals, mostly, I think) become less important anyway.
Several of the largest cities in the country are in this region. Though admittedly there does tend to be more "citysuburbsurburb...nothing for 300 miles...city.."
Phoenix-D on
0
TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Seems like if you'd want the borders closing to have any effect, it needs to happen yesterday. Is doing so a diplomatic no no, or is it considered acceptable?
You don't really impact the livelihood of tens of thousands of people unless you're sure it's necessary. Unless it's Madagascar, which has already erected a steel-reinforced concrete seawall topped with surface-to-air missile sites.
Seems like if you'd want the borders closing to have any effect, it needs to happen yesterday. Is doing so a diplomatic no no, or is it considered acceptable?
I think "we don't want to infect you guys with this terrible disease" is probably accepted in diplomatic circles. But they wouldn't want to do it unless they had to, which is the question. It certainly does seem like they missed their chance, especially since its already gotten to the US.
Seems like if you'd want the borders closing to have any effect, it needs to happen yesterday. Is doing so a diplomatic no no, or is it considered acceptable?
I think "we don't want to infect you guys with this terrible disease" is probably accepted in diplomatic circles. But they wouldn't want to do it unless they had to, which is the question. It certainly does seem like they missed their chance, especially since its already gotten to the US.
that would essentially be a blockade. So, a definite nono, and based on what happened in Canada back when SARS was the bogey man of the hour, I wouldn't think that such an action is necessary or reasonable unless there's a real threat happening.
Health Officials Investigate Illness at Queens Private School
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
Published: April 24, 2009
The New York City health department dispatched a team of investigators to a private school in Queens on Friday after dozens of students complained of symptoms that officials believed were consistent with a strain of swine flu that has swept Mexico City.
The agency said about 75 students at St. Francis Preparatory School had complained Thursday of nausea, fever, dizziness and aches and pains. Several of the students were said to have recently traveled to Mexico, where as many as 61 people have died and possibly hundreds more have been infected in an outbreak of swine flu in recent weeks.
The thing I don't understand about the flu scares is: what am I supposed to do? Like, I'll try to avoid licking my hands after sticking them in urinals I guess, but at what point can I do anything productive in response to the warning "There may be a flu pandemic!". I got my shot, stop yelling.
You're supposed to panic, and then willingly give away your rights, freedoms and more of your tax dollars to the government. This is only after the media has sufficiently contributed to the hysteria in an effort to generate as much revenue as possible.
Marketing is also important. This is the nefarious SWINE FLU. Not to be confused with cute little piggy flu.
Oh you're absolutely going to hate your life when a plausibly contagious outbreak hits a US city. Because while many people - liberals, even - will protest excessive government power on civil rights or taxes, polling shows that most people support whatever recommendations public health officials dole out. Even if it's quarantine, i.e., locking people in their homes at the command of a doctor.
Because even in completely a-liberal places like Singapore or the PRC, experience has demonstrated that even with 24 hour video monitoring and electronic tagging, someone's going to break quarantine and see nothing wrong about doing so, thereby adding a few hundred more people to the quarantine list.
AFAIK there aren't any libertarian approaches to disease control beyond denying that sufficiently deadly and contagious diseases exist... care to suggest any?
If there is some disastrous outbreak that threatens humanity as we know it then measures should be taken, and we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
This particular issue? It doesn't appear to anywhere near that. Certainly the media finds a story like this fascinating and yes the CDC is taking a close look. But an Ebola outbreak this is not.
So yes when we discuss a hypothetical pandemic disaster I honestly don't have a realistic solution that doesn't shred the constitution or result in the deaths of millions. That said we haven't really seen one that actually fits that description in a civilized country since the advent on modern medicine. What we have seen are the typical pandemic scares every 2-3 years or so, or perhaps an anthrax threat that the media likes to bandy about as potentially devastating. However it never seems to result in the destruction that they claim. Old people do get sick and those of poor constitution may die, but the typical flu can do that too. We've yet to see the black plague return and short of Dr. Evil behind some kind of drugs in the water supply type of scheme I doubt we ever will.
Posts
Yeah. Fucking America with their 65000 massive pig farms with $14 billion in annual profit.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters
Seriously. I have a hard time believeing that these pig flu can't come from America because you have some sense of self righteousness for America.
These flu's are very much grown in the middle of america not "remote, god forsaken corners of the earth"
Well, it depends on what your definition of "sick" is, I guess. If you think people should stay home every time they get a runny nose or feel a little woozy, you're asking a whole lot of people to forego weeks of work and thousands of dollars in pay, which isn't exactly reasonable. If I come in to work with a cold and I take some common-sense precautions, nobody else is going to get sick.
You're supposed to panic, and then willingly give away your rights, freedoms and more of your tax dollars to the government. This is only after the media has sufficiently contributed to the hysteria in an effort to generate as much revenue as possible.
Marketing is also important. This is the nefarious SWINE FLU. Not to be confused with cute little piggy flu.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whisper
With a 10% mortality rate?
Or is this heresy?
"Hearsay."
Calling any pig disease "swine (something)" is pretty common, try again.
As for "hysteria"- sure, some of it is. And how many of those have resulted in anything you name? Very few.
As for tax dollars, I'm thinking spending a little money to prevent a pandemic is a Good Thing, with a very large return on the money. Remember that the 1918 flu outbreak killed more than WW1. We spend trillions on preventing war; spending billions on stopping disease that kills MORE isn't a bad idea.
Not sure how many people will understand your spoiler. But you got him there.
Also, the US is full of pig farms. If those farms are hit, that means no more bacon!
Fort Detrick disease samples may be missing
Is it time to panic yet?
No.
The numbers are all very new. I highly doubt that only 1000 people have been infected. Wait at least a few more days, then we can start putting a bit more stock in the numbers we've been getting.
I daresay heresy has a mortality rate.
Oh you're absolutely going to hate your life when a plausibly contagious outbreak hits a US city. Because while many people - liberals, even - will protest excessive government power on civil rights or taxes, polling shows that most people support whatever recommendations public health officials dole out. Even if it's quarantine, i.e., locking people in their homes at the command of a doctor.
Because even in completely a-liberal places like Singapore or the PRC, experience has demonstrated that even with 24 hour video monitoring and electronic tagging, someone's going to break quarantine and see nothing wrong about doing so, thereby adding a few hundred more people to the quarantine list.
AFAIK there aren't any libertarian approaches to disease control beyond denying that sufficiently deadly and contagious diseases exist... care to suggest any?
That's neat. I feel better already.
IIRC though, bird flu in China was linked to chicken farms as much as natural populations. Rule of thumb: squashing a whole lot of critters into one space and then stressing their immune systems like crazy is a baaaaaad idea.
runny nose is a cold. Coughing, sneezing and at rare times, explosive diarrhea is the flu which is what we're talking about.
Now for "forgoing thousands of dollars in pay", you've got sick days, everyone's got sick days, in fact I'm pretty sure even the Chinese have sick days. Taking the three or four days off isn't going to cost you anything.
And if you're working in an office, you're going to spread it. It's air borne, so it doesn't matter if you wash hands with bleach every five seconds, you're going to spread it in to the air and it will circulate.
The fever in particular is a good give-away.
* - This isn't true in practice because of how readily Influenzavirus A recombines. In the course of a single infection in a single host, its virulence will oscillate more than the expected statistical decline of transmissibility from immune response/sick syndrome.
edit Had a wrong word, corrected with bolded
Are there standard models that predict what set of events (e.g. unconnected infected, human-to-human transmission) correspond to what probabilities of this getting serious?
In other words, what are we now watching for in terms of evidence that this is serious or will blow over?
Or are we just completely in the dark?
The WHO probably has stuff like that, they, as the title says are "very, very concerned".
But I don't know. I haven't heard anything about quarantine yet, and so much of this is still unknown.
On the subject of transmission factor, we're going to probably move forward with no use from any information we already have. This is a summer flu coinciding with the allergy season in many regions; even if people were in the second phase [of the four usually noted: incubating, pre-immune, rising, and falling], they're probably not going to the doctor because conventional wisdom is that "it's just the changing weather" or "it's just allergies." The symptoms with high specificity, that non flu-sufferers are not experiencing, only come as you hit the last two phases.
Incubation is generally 1 - 3 days. Length of symptoms prior to the symptoms accompanying immune response run the gamut from 1 - 4 days. Longer incubation periods are usually associated with a slower immune response that plateaus more sharply: e.g., for the H1N1 highly-pathogenic strains that provoke pneumonia in the weak and cytokine storms in the healthy, you get a long incubation and a long period of "this is probably just a cold," and then an intense immune response which will run its course fairly quickly.
We could have an entire weeks' worth of worldwide nascent highly-pathogenic H1N1 based on what we've seen. There's nothing that excludes this, but technically also nothing yet which demonstrates it. Influenza outbreaks, however, are notoriously hard to predict, and are marked by having lower rates of transmissibility than raw numbers might suggest; it's human habits, and especially in the second phase when transmission is most likely but the flu-specific symptoms have not yet arisen, that propagate it so far by iterating the fractal pattern, instead of creating very large fractals.
The tl;dr is that it's too soon to say anything definitive about how bad this is going to be, but we technically have nothing which excludes the worst-case scenario. As we move forward, that's what's going to be revealed first -- not the extent of how bad this likely will be, but what's the worst that could happen. That's not always fearmongering, it's just the way that the information gets revealed.
There absolutely are such models. I once spent a frightening road trip with an Army Captain who specialized in the alphabet soup warfare stuff (NBCR). That was years ago and it's not like we discussed equations on the road trip, but such things definitely do exist.
However we are almost entirely in the dark since we're just some blokes on the internet.
I so should have saved up more sick days.
We don't know if the locus is actually in Mexico yet, though with few notable exceptions we should hope that it is. Even assuming that, I don't know enough about livestock to really say if the southwest US would be boned more than any other region in the Americas with a comparable population density (and large reservoirs, with some airports in the southwest being major hubs). I also don't know what the ultimate effect of the claim to swine-bird-human hybridization being ... though as human-to-human transmission continues, those interspecies liabilities (rehybridization and reservoir populations in domestic animals, mostly, I think) become less important anyway.
And stored up on more supplies for the inevitable apocalypse.
Several of the largest cities in the country are in this region. Though admittedly there does tend to be more "citysuburbsurburb...nothing for 300 miles...city.."
You don't really impact the livelihood of tens of thousands of people unless you're sure it's necessary. Unless it's Madagascar, which has already erected a steel-reinforced concrete seawall topped with surface-to-air missile sites.
I think "we don't want to infect you guys with this terrible disease" is probably accepted in diplomatic circles. But they wouldn't want to do it unless they had to, which is the question. It certainly does seem like they missed their chance, especially since its already gotten to the US.
that would essentially be a blockade. So, a definite nono, and based on what happened in Canada back when SARS was the bogey man of the hour, I wouldn't think that such an action is necessary or reasonable unless there's a real threat happening.
Possibly a fluke, possibly very .
How would getting the regular flu impact my risk to any new strain of flu?
As someone who just got over an oddly timed summer flu: this is a good question.
If there is some disastrous outbreak that threatens humanity as we know it then measures should be taken, and we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
This particular issue? It doesn't appear to anywhere near that. Certainly the media finds a story like this fascinating and yes the CDC is taking a close look. But an Ebola outbreak this is not.
So yes when we discuss a hypothetical pandemic disaster I honestly don't have a realistic solution that doesn't shred the constitution or result in the deaths of millions. That said we haven't really seen one that actually fits that description in a civilized country since the advent on modern medicine. What we have seen are the typical pandemic scares every 2-3 years or so, or perhaps an anthrax threat that the media likes to bandy about as potentially devastating. However it never seems to result in the destruction that they claim. Old people do get sick and those of poor constitution may die, but the typical flu can do that too. We've yet to see the black plague return and short of Dr. Evil behind some kind of drugs in the water supply type of scheme I doubt we ever will.