Pandemics and bio terrorism

[Drinkthekoolaid]

So I haven't given much thought to pandemics or bio terrorism. In watching a show on AHC called how the world ends. And this episode is about pandemics.

I forgot how panicked people were with SARS and how many people actually died. That's somewhat of a distant memory. More recently everyone remember the Ebola scare but luckily that was a much smaller more localized level but it almost expanded out of control.

I'm starting to think a natural pandemic (ex. Bird flu mutations) or deliberate bio attack (or cdc human errors or mistakes) is a much greater threat than I've considered yet, but I should learn more about it.

Bill gates has some creepy takes on this subject as well...

 

[spat]

Something like the 1918 spanish flu epidemic is a good "worst case scenerio" to consider. More people killed in 1 year than the entire black death/bubonic plague epidemic. Society didn't collapse, in fact, it was less of a blow to society than the 1929 stock market collapse. Bear that in mind when people tell you that economic considerations should take a back seat to the environment.

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history.

It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war.

In the two years that this scourge ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world's population was infected.

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic

 

[gun_slinger_boy]

SARS lol. The death tole was under 800 worldwide. Just like the ebola and h1n1 scares it's just panic inciting. If the bubonic plague (which still exists btw) didn't wipe out the entire world with the primitive medicine at the time, I don't think there is anything to worry about on that scale. Besides. The cure to SARS is chicken noodle soup, dayquil and sprite.

 

[Acer-m14]

SARS lol. The death tole was under 800 worldwide. Just like the ebola and h1n1 scares it's just panic inciting. If the bubonic plague (which still exists btw) didn't wipe out the entire world with the primitive medicine at the time, I don't think there is anything to worry about on that scale. Besides. The cure to SARS is chicken noodle soup, dayquil and sprite.

or a bottle of brandy too

 

[prambo]

Something like the 1918 spanish flu epidemic is a good "worst case scenerio" to consider. More people killed in 1 year than the entire black death/bubonic plague epidemic. Society didn't collapse, in fact, it was less of a blow to society than the 1929 stock market collapse. Bear that in mind when people tell you that economic considerations should take a back seat to the environment.









The 1918 Influenza Pandemic

That's what killed my Father's Mother, she was a nurse. IIRC, that outbreak effected those "in the prime of life", rather than the younger and older parts of the population.

 

[JaguarJaguarGolf]

At a large meeting between the Federal Gov't and NYC in 1997, the feds brought out a guy described as the father of American bio-weapons program. His proposal during his presentation was to take 50 NYC Police Officers, 50 Firefighters, 50 EMS Techs, and 50 Sanitation workers, and 50 people from the NYC Dept. of Health and teach them everything he knew about biological warfare over a 2 year period. Mayor Guliani said no because the feds wouldn't cover part of the NYC workers salaries.
One good thing that came out of the meeting. Nine major cities were required to report certain symptoms to the Surgeon General within 24 hours,all others within days, i.e. fever with rash.

An issue that was made clear, even to the bad guys, was that we in the western world have the ability to contain a pandemic, the bad guys don't. Any release of a bio-weapon would affect the third world where these guys hide, more than it would the modern world.

I had a bio-chemistry professor Fordham whose favorite topic was the Pandemic of 1918. This guy had a lab over at Rockefeller University. Gave me an "A-" on the paper I wrote about it. My position in the paper was that the flu ended WWI, not any battlefield or political actions. The US stopped the draft before the war ended because so many guys were dying and getting ill in boot camp. The armies in Europe, with the exception of the British, had a hard time conducting operations because so many were sick in the fall of 1918. The British Army could still conduct operations, they got the flu the spring before.

 

[spat]

That's what killed my Father's Mother, she was a nurse. IIRC, that outbreak effected those "in the prime of life", rather than the younger and older parts of the population.

That was one of the more unusual aspects of that particular virus. It actually turned your immune system against you, so those with the strongest immune systems were most severely affected.