Mutation in the Bird Flu

Monroe · Post by **Monroe** » Fri Oct 05, 2007 6:53 pm

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071005/sc_ ... tations_dc

Scary shit.

celeritas · Post by **celeritas** » Wed Oct 10, 2007 10:29 pm

sure is, we only have 3 antiviral drugs to treat parainfluenza viruses with too!

Monroe · Post by **Monroe** » Thu Oct 11, 2007 12:01 am

None work well.. besides, can you imagine the carnage this would do in Africa or India? As it is now it still kills about 2/3rds the people who get it.

Azrael · Post by **Azrael** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 10:50 am

Well, stock for biological safety equipment like HEPA filters, and gas masks are gonna go through the roof..

Post by **Tsukiyumi** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 11:00 am

Yay! I always hoped I would be around for the highly-anticipated and over-hyped Apocalypse. It's either this, or Oust antibacterial air-freshener will eventually create airborne flesh-eating bactieria...

Jim · Post by **Jim** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 12:11 pm

The planet needs a good enemia. Every year we keep hearing bout a massive pandemic, but they all fall short. West Nile, SARS, Bird Flu, etc... We need one to actually do what the nay-sayers claim it will do.

Post by **Tsukiyumi** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 12:15 pm

Thus why I purposely keep my apartment messy. That and occasional laziness.

celeritas · Post by **celeritas** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 5:10 pm

Monroe wrote:None work well.. besides, can you imagine the carnage this would do in Africa or India? As it is now it still kills about 2/3rds the people who get it.

yeah none of our antivirals work well for anything (for influenza, they typically reduce the duration of symptoms by a whole whopping day and you get a buttload of adverse effects to boot). unfortunately, which its also why they are so precious: if we lose them, we've got nothing at all. poor antiviral use against H5N1 has already rendered amantadine pretty much useless. the best shot we have against viral agents in vaccines and the ones we have for influenza are best-guesses.

as for africa and india, they have many other things to worry about that are much more fatal and much more infectious than bird flu. the real fear is really if H5N1 mutates into something like the H1N1 influenza of 1918 with human-to-human transmission. if that happens, then we're really screwed.

Monroe · Post by **Monroe** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 7:32 pm

Common names? I know the 1918 one is the Spanish Influenza.

celeritas · Post by **celeritas** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 10:56 pm

Monroe wrote:Common names? I know the 1918 one is the Spanish Influenza.

those are the common names, unless you prefer "highly pathogenic avian influenza virus of type A of subtype H5N1". There are many other avian flu's out there but the only one we really worry about is H5N1 because of its propensity for zoonotic transmission (the H and the N refer to the hemagglutinin and neuraminidase subtypes.)

Spanish influenza of 1918 was an H1N1 influenza virus that gets the dubious honor of being the most lethal and infamous influenza pandemic in recorded history.

Granitehewer · Post by **Granitehewer** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 10:59 pm

indeed, it wiped out alot of my family, ironically who survived the war and even had been decorated

Monroe · Post by **Monroe** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 1:25 am

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K8KvHxh1VI puts the Bird Flu in an easy to understand dialogue.

Post by **Mikey** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 4:27 pm

What's to understand? Humans have adapted themselves to fill every environmental niche that this planet has to offer - why are we so shocked that this virus has remarkable adaptive abilities as well? And don't get me started on bacterial diseases... I don't know about you folks from other nations, but in America, misuse of antibiotics has gotten so bad that pediatricians BEG parents not to use them. People use antibiotics in their kids for all sorts of non-bacterial illnesses (against which, of course, antibiotics are useless,) to the point that they've become so commonplace that the bacteria adapt into a resistant variety in the blink of an eye.