Bird Flu Is Back....H7N9

Thrill wrote: »

Its funny the way people think that a virus only becomes important once it starts killing people by the hundreds or thousands.

The most important time is when it first appears, when as few people as possible have it. Keeping infections and the death toll down, containing the virus, finding the best treatment until a vaccine is found, finding the source or host.

This is the most vital time-period when a virus appears. Right now. If the Chinese get this right and keep it contained and prevent infections then that would be the big story of H7N9, though it wont make many headlines.

+1. We may be flippant about it, but if a bad flu kicks off we'd be in real trouble. The pandemic of 1918 killed between 50 and 100 million of the world's population. That's the tally of the whole of World War Two on all sides. Growing up I heard stories of the time from elderly relatives of people dying in high numbers here in Ireland.

Yes we have better medical knowledge these days, but even with all of that we could be very quickly overwhelmed if a strain like the 1918 one kicked off. Add in increasing antibiotic resistance regarding secondary infections and we'd be in a right mess. The other thing about many of these strains is they tend to be more deadly to the young and healthy. Their own immune systems kill them. Older people and young kids because their immune systems aren't so strong have more chance of survival. I recall reading of an Inuit settlement in Canada IIRC, which was very isolated and very badly hit through the 1918 pandemic and when people got to the settlement they afterwards, they found mostly old people and kids left. Scary stuff.

There are viruses and other disease agents out there that could mutate and cause incredible damage. We forget that in Europe for the guts of 500 years up to the 18th century there were rolling "plagues" that killed millions. Not just the plague/Black death either. Judging by the records there were all sorts of odd diseases with varying symptoms they lumped under the plague title. One was the sweating disease in Tudor times that did in thousands. In one way Europe and Europeans are "lucky". We've had these rolling plagues and each one of us are descendants of those who survived them, which seems to have given us some immunity, compared to other populations. EG HIV. HIV has hit Europe and those of European descent a lot less hard than in Asia and particularly Africa and some of this seems to be down to local protective mutations in Europeans. Indeed there are Europeans who are essentially immune to HIV, while others need much more exposure to get it. Another example was the colonisation of the new world. European diseases killed many millions of the native Americans. Diseases that to Europeans were just accepted and rarely caused death, measles, chicken pox etc, even the common cold.