Tag Archives: pandemic

Trump and the next pandemic

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Add to the stupidity of the Trump administration slashing funding to prepare for and respond to the next deadly pandemic outbreak. These are the unwanted border crossings we should actually be worried about, and by helping people in countries where diseases are breaking out we could also be protecting ourselves.

The investments made after the 2014 Ebola crisis have been slashed in recent proposed federal budgets from the Centers for Disease Control, the agency that works to stop deadly diseases in their tracks, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which responds to international disasters, including the Ebola outbreak. Moreover, Timothy Ziemer, the top White House official in charge of pandemic preparedness, has left his job, and the biosecurity office he ran was summarily disbanded…

Perhaps most terrifying, difficult to treat and highly fatal strains of H7N9 avian influenza are spreading throughout China.

This strain of bird flu causes rapid respiratory illness with associated multiorgan dysfunction that’s easily spread by a small droplet. That’s why it’s so difficult to control and why recurrent epidemics continue to crop up: There have been five epidemics of H7N9 since 2013 in China alone, the most recent between the fall of 2016 and fall of 2017. Across these epidemics, among the 1,565 confirmed cases, about 40 percent of infected individuals died.

May 2017 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • The public today is more complacent about nuclear weapons than they were in the 1980s, even though the risk is arguably greater and leaders seem to be more ignorant and reckless.
  • The NSA is trying “to identify laboratories and/or individuals who may be involved in nefarious use of genetic research”.
  • We hit 410 ppm at Mauna Loa.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • Some experts think the idea of national sovereignty itself is now in doubt.
  • Taser wants to record everything the police do, everywhere, all the time, and use artificial intelligence to make sense of the data.
  • The sex robots are here.

October 2016 in Review

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3 most frightening stories

  • The U.S. electric grid is being systematically probed by hackers working for foreign governments.
  • According to James Hansen, the world needs “negative” greenhouse gas emissions right away, meaning an end to fossil fuel burning and improvements to agriculture, forestry, and soil conservation practices to absorb carbon. Part of the current problem is unexpected and unexplained increases in methane concentrations in the atmosphere.
  • The epidemics that devastated native Americans after European arrival were truly some of the most horrific events in history, and a cautionary tale for the future.

3 most hopeful stories

  • New technology can read your heartbeat by bouncing a wireless signal off you. Mark Zuckerberg has decided to end disease.
  • While he still has people’s attention, Obama has been talking about Mars and zoning. Elon Musk wants to be the one to take you and your stuff to Mars.
  • Maine is taking a look at ranked choice voting. Ironically, the referendum will require approval by a simple majority of voters. Which makes you wonder if there are multiple voting options that could be considered and, I don’t know, perhaps ranked somehow? What is the fairest system of voting on what is the fairest system of voting?

3 most interesting stories

infectious disease

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The Royal Society says that the annual number of disease outbreaks and types of diseases causing them have both increased since 1980, although the fraction of the population affected has actually decreased. I assume this last trend has to do with population growth. I am not sure this should be comforting. If there are more outbreaks and more different types, it seems like there would be more potential for something really bad to emerge and then get out of control. But this article isn’t really about that, it’s just a presentation of the data.

Our analyses indicate that the total number of outbreaks and richness of causal diseases have each increased globally since 1980 (figure 1a). Bacteria and viruses represented 70% of the 215 diseases in our dataset and caused 88% of outbreaks over time. Sixty-five per cent of diseases in our dataset were zoonoses that collectively caused 56% of outbreaks (compared to 44% of outbreaks caused by human-specific diseases). Non-vector transmitted pathogens were more common (74% of diseases) and caused more outbreaks (87%) than vector transmitted pathogens (table 1). Salmonellosis caused the most outbreaks of any disease in the dataset (855 outbreaks reported since 1980). However, viral gastroenteritis (typically caused by norovirus) was responsible for the greatest number of recorded cases: more than 15 million globally since 1980.

It’s interesting how we tend to be less afraid of diseases that are more common and more afraid of ones that are less common, even though a given person would be more likely to suffer from a common disease. Of course, this analysis doesn’t take into account the severity of the disease and suffering caused, which should certainly be a factor in what kinds of controls and research we invest our efforts and money in.

mosquito bites

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Here’s some practical advice from NPR on how to avoid mosquito bites. DEET works, and has been more or less proven safe. So, somewhat surprisingly, does eucalyptus oil.

I am fairly careful about mosquitoes, and yet I have been bitten by them in Florida, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and less exotic places on the U.S. eastern seaboard. So far I haven’t caught West Nile, St. Louis, dengue, chikungunya, Japanese encephalitis, and had never even heard of Zika until last month although it is supposedly common in places I have been. Then again, I could have an asymptomatic infection with one or more of these, who knows. If you talk to enough people from tropical countries, the majority have had dengue at some point, usually with a full recovery. But it can cause a particularly cruel and grizzly death in a few unlucky cases.

None of this is to make light of the horrible complications we are seeing with Zika. It’s just that like anything, your best bet is to take reasonable precautions and try to be as rational about the likelihood and consequences of unfamiliar risks as a human can.

MERS in South Korea

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“Middle East Respiratory Syndrome” has popped up in South Korea.

A deadly virus with no known cure — Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS — has infected 13 people in South Korea since mid-May. The fast spread of the disease, from the first case confirmed on May 20 to more than a dozen by Saturday, is prompting criticism of health officials for not moving faster to quarantine suspected patients…

MERS is from the same family as the virus that triggered China’s 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. Scientists first identified it in 2012, and since then, more than 1,100 cases have been reported in 23 countries, with the bulk majority of cases occurring in the Middle East.

So far, not only is there no known cure, there’s no vaccine to prevent it, either.