Posted on 04/19/2013 2:11:38 PM PDT by blam
Maybe they will stop doing that. There's a lot to be said about a farm to market system where animals are slaughtered and inspected at a central facility, so that people know they aren't buying infected meat.
I work in that industry. It isn’t quite what you think
The problem is they’re the boy who cried wolf. Over and over and over. SARS was a joke, bird flu was a joke, swine flu was a joke... twice. I don’t think we’ll get a real pandemic from any of the cold and flu based diseases again. Medicine has gotten too good, cleanliness has gotten too good. I suppose Obamacare might change that, the only place SARS ever proved to be a threat was where socialized medicine lived. Now Ebola or one of those other fast moving mystery diseases, they might get us, but there’s not going to be a 1918 flu again.
And, once again, you illustrate very nicely the problem that public health officials have. When they are successful, many members of the public see only that there was concern, nothing apparently happened, and conclude that there was much ado about nothing.
The reason SARS turned out to be no big deal was because when it hit, there was a coordinated international effort to contain it. We were also fortunate in that SARS becomes symptomatic before it becomes contagious. As it was, there were over 8,000 cases with about a 10% fatality rate, and the disease escaped its place of origin. Without public health officials "crying wolf", as you say, SARS could have been devastating.
Unlike SARS, influenza is contagious before symptoms appear. It makes containment difficult, since you can't tell by looking whether to avoid someone.
Medicine is only "good" because we have learned how to prevent a lot of diseases. The power of "cleanliness" to prevent disease is limited, depending on the route of transmission. Vaccines are good at reducing disease, but it can take years to develop a vaccine for a new disease. There are a number of diseases that we cannot develop vaccines for (not that we haven't tried). Once a person comes down with the disease, they can easily die. Despite good supportive care and the use of antivirals, tens of thousands of people in the US die of influenza every year--that's equivalent to the number of people killed in car accidents, and more than are killed by murder.
There is a general rule of thumb regarding infectious disease, that the more deadly the disease is, the less likely it is to spread widely. Ebola is so deadly that it kills patients before they have much of a chance to transmit the disease, and it is mostly transmitted through body fluids (not through the air). The big fear with influenza is that a strain that humans have never caught before will emerge--meaning that no one has residual immunity against it like we do against common flu strains--and that it will be highly contagious. The reason bird flu isn't a problem now is that it is not contagious. If it ever becomes contagious, and it remains just as deadly, we'll have a serious problem. The challenge for public health workers is to prevent that from happening, so that people like you can continue to think that disease prevention efforts amount to nothing more than "crying wolf."
Heh heh heh ... bird flu ... Black Swan ... I get it.
Remember, though, the Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf’ was eventually right.
But only he got killed. Everybody else finally got to get a decent night’s sleep.
No the reason SARS turned out not be a big deal here is because we don’t leave obviously very contagious people in hospital hallways to spend hours spreading their germs to every passing, mostly already immune system compromised, person. SARS was bad in places where the medical system is poorly run, where the medical system is run by actual professionals that bother to think things through it was no big deal.
Our medicine is good for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is an over active OTC industry. We’re very good at attacking symptoms. And we’re also much better at not being around sick people, which is a big part of cleanliness, and the best disease blocker there is.
They ARE crying wolf. Actually what they’re crying is “INCREASE OUR BUDGET”. Every few years CDC and WHO come up with another something we should panic about, it’s their need to remain relevant, because if they lose relevancy they lose budget. Meanwhile every single thing they tell us to panic about burns out on its own. They are lying to us, it’s just that simple, follow the money and stop believing them.
The reason SARS was contained was because a huge number of people sprang into action to contain it. And we were extremely fortunate that SARS is only contagious after symptoms occur. Influenza is contagious before symptoms occur. Do you seriously think we would have been able to stop SARS from spreading around the world if it were more like influenza, with people being highly contagious without having symptoms? This article tells some of how SARS was contained, although it does not get into many of the specifics.
BTW, I should point out that even in areas like Africa, which have the worst health care systems in the world, they know to isolate infectious patients. That's a very low-tech measure to take. What our superior health-care system gives is a better chance of survival if we become sick.
You don’t happen to have a whiskey & xanaz ping list, do you?
No. I merely create the need.
That you do. Fortunately I’m always prepared for ya pings:)
Long time no see!
SARS never even came close to not being contained in America. Three patient zeros, no patient ones. That’s called good medicine. If a Toronto hospital hadn’t allowed not one but TWO SARS patients to hang out in the halls for hours, until they died and beyond, it would have been contained there too.
SARS was contained because it ran into 20th century medicine, it ran rampant where it was battling 19th and 18th century medicine, or in China NO medicine. Your own numbers point out how moronic the SARS panic was, normal flu in America killed more than SARS world wide, it was another fake panic. They’re ALL fake panics. They wave around 1918 every few years and suckers like you jump for it every time. Pay attention to your own numbers, stop believing their lies. I can already tell you how this panic will go, 4 months from now nobody will care and it will be another non-pandemic that didn’t actually kill any more people than a normal every year flu. That’s how they ALL work out. Every couple of years they pick something else to freak out about and NOTHING HAPPENS. Swine flu: NOTHING. Bird flu: NOTHING. SARS: NOTHING. West Nile: NOTHING.
The pattern is there, as soon as you’re willing to admit it you can skip to the end like I do. It’s nothing.
Pattern recognition isn’t cynical, it’s life’s spoiler alert.
Yeah it’s been a while. Hope all is well.
All on this end is as well as could be expected in The Obama Nation.
You're well, I trust?
It’s not my fault there’s a disease scare every presidential term. Which is a thing that once you notice you kinda gotta go “hmmm”.
Things are groovy here. Nice wife, nice weather, nice health, can’t ask for much more.
In other words, you’re saying that the success of organizations like the CDC, WHO, etc., in preventing diseases like SARS from becoming worldwide pandemics is proof we don’t need these organizations.
Okay. Gotcha, then.
Avian flu H5N1 has a 60% fatality rate. H7N9, almost 20%. You tell me how these WON’T be a huge problem if they become as contagious as seasonal flu.
Your position is exceedingly contradictory. You seem to have complete faith in the ability of modern medicine to stop these epidemics in their tracks, while claiming that modern medicine is utterly unneeded and a waste of money.
If you want to argue a completely non-scientific and fact-free position, fine, but at least try to make it internally consistent.
Avian flu H5N1 has a 60% fatality rate. H7N9, almost 20%
The one spread by diseased chickens is not nearly as scary as the one spread person to person, even though the fatality rate might be lower.
No what I’m saying is that when the quad annual panic disease hits and every single time the global kill rate is less than regular old every day flu (in fact less than regular old every day flu in just America generally) that’s clear evidence that the panic was unfounded.
You throw around these fatality rates like they have meaning. Problem is they don’t, it’s another part of the lie. Those rates are based only on KNOWN cases, we have no idea how many people get the illness and shake it off without even bothering to go to the doctor. I don’t know if I’ve ever had the flu, because my cold/flu like symptom never get bad enough for me to go the doctor, so I never get diagnosed.
No my position is exceedingly SENSIBLE. I’ve looked at the evidence, and the evidence is these pandemic panics are built on LIES. They happen too regularly (pretty much one for every presidential term) with too regular an influx of money to the budget, and we always win. That just doesn’t add up, there’s no way we’re both so unlucky to have these problems show up every few years AND so lucky that we always manage to contain it with minimum death every single time. Your position has the contradiction, your is the one that has to believe we’re constantly on the razor edge of being wiped out by a new variant of an old disease but always manage to pull out the miracle save every time.
My position is the one of science and fact. I’m the one pointing out the fact that the death tolls for these things is always minor, and that it’s general science that’s put us in a position to be in a post pandemic world. Yours is the position that lacks both. You have to point to made up fatality rates that ignore the large part of unknown data and ignoring the fact that every one of these panics has been a bust. Pandemic alarmists and global warming alarmists are really the same people, people addicted to fear and desperately ignoring the data that shows their fear has no basis in fact.
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