2 posts tagged “pandemic”

Talk radio is interesting.

For what seems like years now, conservatives on the radio have been trying to "debunk" global warming claiming that the science is wrong and there are political agendas with climate change, etc.  They claim we don't know what is going to happen because we are talking about planetary climate models and these models possess assumptions.

Yet it what seems to be a very short period of time with regard to the emergence a new H1N1 flu strain that has jumped from pigs to humans and now from human to human -- there are all kinds of calls for government intervention, closing the Mexican border, and calling up the National Guard.

The irony in all of this is that we don't know how this new strain is going to pan out.  It could be a major pandemic that, at worst, kills many people or, at best, it could just be another mild flu strain that will have to evaluated every flu season during flu shot development.  There are many assumptions here, but no conclusive data either way yet.  That is why CDC is sort of in this - be prudent, but don't go Defcon 1 just yet.

So with global warming science -- there are years and years of data and evaluation on the subject and conservatives cry foul.

Now with swine flu -- there is a full court press to politically pile on to the Obama administration for not doing enough.

Ain't politics grand?

Hmmm... This is interesting.

Researchers in New York believe they have solved one of the great mysteries of the flu: Why does the infection spread primarily in the winter months?

The answer, they say, has to do with the virus itself. It is more stable and stays in the air longer when air is cold and dry, the exact conditions for much of the flu season.

“Influenza virus is more likely to be transmitted during winter on the way to the subway than in a warm room,” said Peter Palese, a flu researcher who is professor and chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the lead author of the flu study.

Dr. Palese published details of his findings in the Oct. 19 issue of PLoS Pathogens. The crucial hint that allowed him to do his study came from a paper published in the aftermath of the 1918 flu pandemic, when doctors were puzzling over why and how the virus had spread so quickly and been so deadly.

So, under the assumption of continued global warming, I wonder if milder winters mean that flu epidemics become milder as well?  So much for the flu pandemic that ends humanity?

But before we get too crazy about this -- we should realize that this is peer-reviewed science and it really doesn't mean anything.