"...However, WHO says it is too soon to advise drug firms to switch to producing a new vaccine...."

Seems like ominous foreshadowing to me. (should this be read as "The WHO -we are inept, call the even more inept CDC and lets form a panel called... wait until a bunch of you fuckers die before we decide on a course of action-plan)?

http://news.scotsman.com/15589/Global-aler...adly.5206544.jp

Pandemic alert over deadly swine flu



« Previous « PreviousNext » Next »View GalleryPublished Date: 26 April 2009
By Kate Foster
THE World Health Organisation was last night trying to find a way to halt the spread of a deadly new strain of flu across the world.
After a crisis meeting following the deaths of up to 68 people in Mexico, WHO declared swine flu could turn into a pandemic.

More than 1,000 others are reported to have been infected by the virus in Mexico. Health officials believe at least eight ADVERTISEMENTschoolchildren in New York have the virus. In addition residents of Kansas, Texas and California have developed symptoms, raising fears the outbreak could hit thousands more.

In London, a British Airways cabin crew member was admitted to hospital yesterday after arriving on a flight from Mexico City.

The flu combines genetic material from pigs, birds and humans in a way scientists have not seen before. The fact that many deaths are among young adults is a hallmark of pandemic flu. WHO says 12 of the Mexican cases have been laboratory confirmed as genetically identical to the swine flu virus detected in the US.

The global health body has said that so far there is no evidence of similar outbreaks elsewhere in the world. But it has advised other countries to look out following the discovery of related strains on both sides of the Mexico-US border. Further measures, such as travel restrictions, may be put in place if the virus spreads.

The virus appears to cause flu-like symptoms that can develop into severe pneumonia. Swine flu is endemic in pigs, but unlike bird flu is able to pass from human to human. There have been three major outbreaks around the world in the past century, including the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, in which the virus mutated into a human form in months, killing 50 million people worldwide.

A WHO spokesman said: "We are very, very concerned. We have what appears to be a novel virus and it has spread from human to human. It's all hands on deck at the moment.

"We do seem to have found incidents of the same illness on both sides of the border in various locations. We're not sure exactly of the transmission routes, where the initial infection came from, how efficient it is in transmitting."

WHO is also questioning why no one has died in the US so far, while there have been confirmed deaths in Mexico. Some parts of the Mexican capital, population 20 million, have ground to a standstill over the crisis. Most of the fatalities have occurred in the city. Mexican authorities have urged people to avoid hospitals unless they have a medical emergency. They also say the public should avoid customary greetings such as shaking hands or kissing.

At Mexico City's international airport, passengers were questioned to try to prevent anyone with flu symptoms from boarding aircraft and spreading the disease.

Mexico City officials said yesterday they are suspending all public events for another 10 days to try to contain the epidemic. A hotline set up the previous day fielded 2,366 calls from frightened city residents who suspected they might have the disease. The Mexican government has given the health department powers to isolate patients and inspect homes, incoming travellers and baggage.

The United Nations health agency has warned for several years that a new virus strain could spark an influenza pandemic that could sweep the globe, killing millions.

This outbreak is particularly alarming as deaths have occurred in at least four regions of Mexico and because the victims have not been vulnerable infants and elderly. The 1918 outbreak also first struck the young and healthy.

Scientists say the current seasonal flu vaccine is not believed to offer protection against this swine flu. But anti-viral drug Tamiflu appears to be fully effective against the H1N1 virus. However, WHO says it is too soon to advise drug firms to switch to producing a new vaccine.

What is a pandemic?

A pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that spreads through populations across a region or across the globe. The criteria for a pandemic are that the disease is new, infects humans, like the swine flu virus, left, and causes serious illness and spreads easily. One major fear is that a virus will spread from birds or animals to humans, creating a new highly lethal strain.

Doesn't it generally take several months to develop a vaccine?

Not saying that's a reason not to do it...

In any case, unpleasant.

Also, as of right now it is not a pandemic, nor is it even close to being one. It could potentially become one, but there's not enough information. If people start getting it in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, then we might have a pandemic.

I just heard about this at the party I just got home from...

Um, I going to Mexico for my sister's wedding in June... and planning on taking my son (who'll be 6 months then). I little scary.

From The Guardian.

The death toll from an outbreak of a human swine flu virus has risen to more than 80 in Mexico as new suspected cases have been reported as far apart as Auckland in New Zealand and New York in the United States.

The World Health Organisation said at least 81 people had died from severe pneumonia caused by the flu-like illness in Mexico. It said the virus has pandemic potential but it has stopped short of issuing a worldwide alert, while it gathers more information.

The New Zealand government announced today it was "likely" that ten students have who had recently returned from Mexico have contracted the virus.

Twenty-five students and teachers in New Zealand, some with flu-like symptoms, were quarantined and tested for swine flu after returning from a trip to Mexico. The group, from New Zealand's largest high school, returned to the northern city of Auckland yesterday on a flight from Los Angeles.

Eight students at school in the Queens area of New York are a "likely" to have contracted the virus, according to the New York Times.

In London, tests showed that a member of cabin crew on a British Airways flight from Mexico City did not have swine flu. The man, who has not been named, was taken to hospital yesterday with "flu-like symptoms" after landing at Heathrow.

A hospital spokesman said: "I can confirm he does not have swine flu. All the tests have come back negative."

The UK Health Protection Agency said it was keeping a close eye on the situation involving human cases of swine influenza in case of any threat to people in this country.

An HPA spokesman said: "No cases of swine flu have been identified in the UK or anywhere in Europe."

Mexican authorities ordered the closure of schools in the capital and the states of Mexico and San Luis Potosi until 6 May. Soldiers and health workers patrolled airports and bus stations, looking for people showing symptoms, which include a fever of more than 100 degrees and coughing.

Twenty people are known to have died in Mexico so far out of a total of 1,324 reported cases, and 48 more deaths are thought to be attributable to the outbreak.

At least nine swine flu cases have been reported in California and Texas. The most recently reported California case, the seventh there, was a 35-year-old woman who was treated in hospital but recovered. The woman, whose illness began in early April, had no known contact with the other cases. At least two more cases have been confirmed in Kansas.

State health officials said yesterday they had confirmed swine flu in a married couple living in the central part of the state after the husband visited Mexico. They have not been hospitalised, and the state described their illnesses as mild. Dr Jason Eberhart-Phillips, Kansas's state health officer, said: "Fortunately, the man and woman understand the gravity of the situation and are very willing to isolate themselves."

The Mexican government yesterday issued a decree authorising President Felipe Calderón to invoke powers allowing the country's health department to isolate patients and inspect homes, travellers and baggage. Mexico's health secretary, José Angel Córdova, said: "We are very, very concerned."

Yesterday, people in Mexico City were being ordered not to kiss or shake hands. Football matches went ahead without spectators, theatres, shops and museums were closed, staff were inside locked schools scrubbing classrooms with disinfectant, and health workers patrolled buses, ordering sickly looking people home.

Scientists have long feared that a new flu virus could launch a worldwide pandemic. Evolving when different flu viruses infect a pig, a person or a bird, mingling their genetic material, a hybrid could spread quickly because humans would have no natural defences.

The director general of the WHO said: "We are seeing a range of severity of the disease, from mild to severe, and of course death. The eight cases in the US have been mild in terms of severity and it is too premature to calculate the mortality rate of this disease."

Any doubts over the extent of the emergency were dispelled last night by the sight of soldiers handing out blue surgical masks to pedestrians and motorists along Mexico City's central boulevard, Paseo de la Reforma. With TV and radio calling on the population to seek medical advice for any flu-like symptoms, queues grew at clinics and hospitals across the city.

Calderón said his government learned only on Thursday night what kind of virus Mexico was facing after tests by specialist laboratories in Canada confirmed the outbreak as a type - labelled A/H1N1 - not previously seen in pigs or humans. Few of the cases appear to have had any contact with live pigs.

The WHO said the virus appeared to be able to spread from human to human and contained human virus, avian virus and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia.

Given how quickly flu can spread, there might be cases incubating around the world already, said Dr Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota: "Hundreds and thousands of travellers come in and out [of Mexico] every day."

It was unclear how much protection current vaccines might offer. A "seed stock" genetically matched to the new virus has already been created by the US Centres for Disease Control. If the US government decides vaccine production is necessary, it would be used by manufacturers to get started.

At Mexico City's international airport, passengers were questioned to try to prevent anyone with flu symptoms from boarding aircraft and spreading the disease. The Foreign Office issued a warning to UK travellers about the outbreak, but stopped short of recommending people did not visit Mexico. US health officials took a similar line, urging visitors to wash their hands frequently.




Mexico doesn't have enough Tamiflu stock built up from previous H5N1 scares, only seems to have killed people in Mexico (could be more than a co-incidence) and compared to the variants of Avian Flu that were killing half the people getting it it's frankly good news that a seemingly milder strain is the one that can be passed between humans and not the more lethal one. Still not pleasant though, naturally.

You should only be worried if you're the type of person who never ever washes their hands. The rest of you should be fine.

Fun game. Not so fun in real life. http://www.crazymonkeygames.com/Pandemic-2.html

If you die of this shit you're probably a pussy anyway.

One of the board games I play with my friends is Pandemic, a cooperative game where the players work together to defeat the games mechanics. One of the hotter games on BoardGameGeek. Players take on various roles (Scientist, Medic, Researcher, Operations, Dispatcher) to attempt to cure a worldwide pandemic. Fun for the whole family!!

One pandemic at a time, plz. Where's my bird flu?

It's not even a epidemic, media can get fucked with this bullshit.

give it a couple days... wait until after all the travel in and out of Mexica City this weekend is over and let's see where we are...

Why can't they ever name it after something attractive...like pearl flu or wisteria flu.

This swine flu is the funniest shit in weeks. We're checking for sick people at the Mexican / American border.

Yeah, god knows that border is airtight.

So, I just bought some grape tomatoes that are a product of Mexico. Should I not eat them?

I don't know. Do they have pig, human and bird RNA?

Seriously, though. This kind of thing is cause for concern but certainly not panic. The story that Mitch posted says 80 people died in Mexico from swine flu, or complications thereof, but most of those are suspected and not confirmed. In any case, there's several isolated cases showing up, but for whatever reason, only the cases in Mexico have proven to be fatal. That's certainly an interesting fact to note.

*speed dials my cancellation on my cruise to Mexico*


I'd rather get swine flu here at home where I can die more comfortably.....ROFLMAO.

This must be biological warfare started by the Taliban.....Muslims don't eat pork!!!!!

The only pandemic is headlines full of bullshit.

Things to bare in mind:

- You can't get it from eating pork, if you don't cook pork before you eat it you were already to stupid to live.
- 20 confirmed deaths, 103 suspected and 1,164 reported cases.
- No-one outside of Mexico has been confirmed with the virus
- Mexico City is one of the most densely populated in the world, racked with poverty and so far barely 0.00005% of the 22 million people that live there have shown symptoms.
- Seems to be affecting different demographic outside of Mexico (children) than in Mexico (healthy adults). Suggests that the worse of it in Mexico may be due to another virus.
- 1,000 people will die on roads in the US this week
- 200,000 of us die every day in the world
- The US authorities say that two drugs commonly used to treat flu, Tamiflu and Relenza, seem to be effective at treating cases that have occurred there so far.
- Most Western countries have enough of this to cover more than the worst estimates of infection levels.
- Shares in Gilead Sciences, Roche and GlaxoSmithKline will rise today.

Just got an e-mail from HR dept. about swine flu. I'm tempted to forward them Mitchell's post.

was feeling a bit dizzy and thought perhaps i had contracted me some swine flu.
turns out it was just sunday.

As I said earlier, I'm going to be in Mexico with my son (who'll be six months old then) for my sister's wedding in early June. I'm kinda bitter that I already bought my plane tickets because I'll bet that the fares are falling and falling fast. Damnit!

my coworker is absolutely freaking out about this because two people on her team are out sick today lol

Al Gore - i assume your sig pic is what things are going to look when swine flu comes crashing down full force

According to the CDC, an average of 36,000 people die of plain old flu & related issues annually in the US. Uh, that was as of 2003.

While most of this is spot on, there are 20 confirmed cases outside of Mexico. Part of the reason that there may have been a higher death rate in Mexico is due to a larger population of uninsured. They say that even the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak would have had a much smaller mortality rate had medicine been more advanced at the time. A lot of the deaths were most likely due to complications like pneumonia, which is treatable now, but wasn't at the time.

Anyway, swine flu or no swine flu, wash your hands.

I'm not saying it's not worthy of concern, of course it is and if no-one reacted to it at all we'd be in trouble. However until someone dies outside of Mexico I don't think we need to really be panicking too much. The world is better prepared for this than in anytime in it's history due to H5N1, SARS and so on. Most of the people in the south of the US who have it appear to be children, a different demographic to those who have the virus in Mexico, suggesting as I said this morning it may be we are looking a stronger virulent strain which isn't spreading beyond Mexico. Most the people who have gone for tests elsewhere in the world have come back negative, no one, as far as I know, is in a serious condition anywhere in the world.

We should be concerned, not alarm we do have the ingredients for a pandemic, but the definition of a pandemic is not dependent of the lethality.

and clearly yes, wash your hands.

I don't feel so hot: I keep making strange squealing noises. I have an almost irresistible urge to root for truffles in the forest.

H5N1, swine flu...there's a (groaner) monologue joke in there somewhere about pigs flying. Mdrufke, get on that.

Pig flu, I thought that was impossible.

It's the a-pork-alypse, hamdemic, e-pig-demic, rub some oink-ment on your chest etc etc.

Heh heh...s'a good one. Made me chuckle.

Right, this is I think what has people panicked. "Pandemic" does not = lethal. It just means it's novel and could spread globally. Could be very mild, like the one that spread in the 50s and 60s.

That said, 1000 cases doesn't equate to a pandemic.

As it should. The quicker it can spread the bigger a problem it will be.

swine flu killed Entwistle. Daltry has every right to be worried

I've been wondering whose prostate Al gores.

Where does a guy that wrote points one to nine get the balls to write "don't panic" as #10?

These are things to BEAR in mind.......unless you catch swine flu on a nude beach!!!

Just another reason to hate Mexico...

is Tamiflu over the counter? or can you make meth with it and accordingly have to show an ID and the little plastic card to a pimply faced dork at the local Wal-Mart?

A thought provoking essay.

Why There Won't Be a Deadly Flu Pandemic

As mothers around the country worry about swine-flu symptoms, meet the doctor with good news: our understanding of disease is, um, wrong.


Originally published in the December 2005 issue

It's not that he doesn't worry. He does, plenty. Raw oysters? Hell no — doesn't touch them. "A lottery," he calls them, with all their potential for vectoring the Vibrio vulnificus pathogen to susceptibles. Clams, the same. And forget sushi. His wife eats it, but not with him around, because he makes her nervous. It's not just uncooked seafood, either: A few years ago, he asked his students to monitor the bacteria counts of chicken in the local supermarket, and when they found a dramatic spike in microbial activity the day before the chicken's sell-by date, he adjusted his shopping patterns accordingly. In public restrooms, he keeps a paper towel wrapped around his fist after washing and drying his hands, because that's one case where "behavior normally associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder makes perfect sense."

You see, when Paul Ewald is speaking of "susceptibles," he's not necessarily referring to a subset of the population earmarked for a particular infection by virtue of a particular vulnerability. He's referring to himself. He's referring to the portion of humanity he calls "the uninfected." He's referring to us. We're all susceptibles in Ewald's view, because Ewald, a fifty-two-year-old evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville, has taken up the evolutionary point of view of the pathogen — the germ. He has gotten into arguments with scientists predisposed to think that most germs are content to live as domestically as dogs. "No," he says, "they're out to have dinner, and their dinner is us. What science has to figure out is what makes some of them voracious and some of them not."

So he worries. He just doesn't happen to worry about the thing that everyone else is worrying about. He doesn't worry about the global pandemic. Or, more precisely, he worries about the possibility of global pandemics, but not the possibility of a global pandemic caused by the H5N1 influenza virus, otherwise known as the bird flu. You know: the pandemic that is supposed to be taking hold in Asia; the pandemic that is already killing nearly all of the domesticated birds it infects; the pandemic that is said to be but one deadly mutation away from awful fruition; the pandemic humanity is due for; the pandemic that is being counted on to kill anywhere from five million to one billion people; the pandemic that is being presented as a kind of natural corrective to globalization; the pandemic that has been wildly politicized before it has even happened; the pandemic that seems both the subject of humanity's dread and the object of its fantastic secret desires — that pandemic. Well, just as any number of virologists and epidemiologists and pharmacologists and journalists have made their careers serving as the pandemic's giddily gloomy heralds, Ewald has made something of a career saying it's not going to happen. It's just not. For it to happen, the world has to change. Not the virus. Not H5N1. The world.

Of course, the virus is already changing. It's mutating. It's evolving. In birds, it has already evolved, becoming amazingly virulent, which means bad, which means lethal. And now it has evolved again, so that human beings in contact with infected birds are getting infected. And dying. It is a jumpy virus, always on the move. All that remains is for it to evolve so that an infected human can sneeze or cough it to a susceptible human, and we're all gonna... but no. That's the fallacy. That's the mistake — the colossal mistake — being made by experts too specialized in their respective disciplines to be expert in basic evolutionary understanding.

"They think that if a virus mutates, it's an evolutionary event," Ewald says. Well, the virus is mutating because that is what viruses and other pathogens do. But evolution is not just random mutation. It is random mutation coupled with natural selection; it is a battle for competitive advantage among different strains generated by random mutation. For bird flu to evolve into a human pandemic, the strain that finds a home in humanity has to be a strain that is both highly virulent and highly transmissible. Deadliness has to translate somehow into popularity; H5N1 has to find a way to kill or immobilize its human hosts, and still find other hosts to infect. Usually that doesn't happen. The idea that Ewald has brought to the understanding of infections is the idea that evolution is all about trade-offs, and in the evolution of infections the trade-off is between virulence and transmissibility. Indeed, for H5N1 to cause a human pandemic, it has to find an environment that favors both. The static squalor of the Western Front at the end of World War I was just such an environment, and from the mingling of the sick and the susceptible in those teeming trenches arose the flu epidemic of 1918, which killed as many as fifty million people worldwide and which has served as a handy precedent for those pimping the coming plague. The crowded chicken farms, slaughterhouses, and markets of eastern Asia provide another such environment, and that environment has, in Ewald's phrase, "cooked up" a pathogen that both kills and spreads — in birds.

"We know that H5N1 is well adapted to birds," Ewald says. "We also know that it has a hard time becoming a virus that can move from person to person. It has a hard time without our doing anything. But we can make it harder. We can make sure it has no human population in which to evolve transmissibility. There is no need to rely on the mass extermination of chickens. There is no need to stockpile vaccines for everyone. By vaccinating just the people most at risk — the people who work with chickens and the caregivers — we can prevent it from becoming transmissible among humans. Then it doesn't matter what it does in chickens."

Ewald started thinking this way — that is, like a germ — twenty-eight years ago. He was then a behavioral ecologist. He was interested in "successes" — in things that were very nearly perfect in terms of their evolutionary adaptation, that were at the very pinnacle of their biological functioning. His epiphany, however, came from the bottom. He was doing fieldwork in Kansas, studying the winter social systems of Harris's sparrows, when he caught a case of diarrhea from his academic adviser's toddler daughter. He thought about the diarrhea, about what caused it and what to do about it. He figured that the diarrhea was probably his body's defense against the pathogen causing the diarrhea — a way of expelling it — in which case he should let the infection take its course untreated. But then he started thinking the way the bug might think, in terms of its adaptive strategies. Maybe, he thought, the diarrhea is not a defense at all but a means by which the pathogen is trying to spread itself: a manipulation. In that case, treatment would help not only himself but others. To take the Imodium or not to take the Imodium? The decision suddenly seemed fundamental, even moral, and it would be informed entirely by the pathogen's evolutionary interests — what it was trying to gain by making him sick.

He began trying to understand the evolution of infections, and so brought Darwin to the realm of medicine. He found that diarrheal diseases could be classified according to a Darwinian framework, and that a Darwinian framework was the best way to predict what made certain diseases severe and others mild. He also found, very quickly, that "a lot of readily accepted medical ideas just don't make any sense when you apply the principles of evolutionary biology." Once Ewald established that medicine's understanding of virulence was "just wrong," he kept up his pursuit of what he calls "the alternative hypothesis" — and kept finding examples of evolutionary ignorance causing what he believed were fundamental mistakes in both thought and practice. How fundamental? In 1991, he first predicted that a flu pandemic as severe as the pandemic of 1918 wasn't going to happen; in the same paper, he began using evolutionary biology to account for the severity of AIDS, and by exploring how infection causes a chronic disease like AIDS, he began to conclude that most chronic diseases are caused by infections. It was an alternative hypothesis, all right, because ultimately it led Ewald to the conclusion that modern medicine was wrong not just about virulence and pandemics but also about the basis of disease... which meant that it was wrong about everything.

As a society, we have come to accept that most chronic diseases begin in our genes. It is — thanks to the human-genome project and much of modern science — the essence of the way we understand ourselves as evolved creatures. Our genome has come to be seen as the sum total of our evolutionary being, and because it is subject to mutation and error, it carries through the generations the potential for diseases such as — well, you name it.

Ewald, though, is of the belief that evolution brings creation toward "something approaching perfection," and so he wondered why natural selection did not do its job and weed out the genes for chronic disease, especially in the case of a disease like schizophrenia. "Most schizophrenics don't reproduce," Ewald says, "so how can schizophrenia be a genetic disease?" As is often the case with Ewald, he followed the implications of a question medicine seemed unable to answer. He surveyed the medical literature and became perhaps the leading theorist for a movement of underfunded scientists who believe that infection answers the question that genetics can't. He believes that you catch schizophrenia. Also autism. Also most cases of atherosclerosis that result in heart attack and stroke. Also Alzheimer's. Also a large percentage of cancers. Also multiple sclerosis. Also impotence.

He does not discount the possibility that our genes are what make us susceptible to infection; indeed, he has published a paper that helped further the idea that people who are at greater risk of heart attack because they have the epsilon 4 gene variant are at risk because epsilon 4 makes them susceptible to infection by a bug called Chlamydia pneumoniae. This concession, however, only amplifies his conviction that medicine can best protect the epsilon 4 population not by reengineering their genes but rather by protecting them from the primary infection. "No infection, no disease," says Ewald.

Like evolution itself, it is a simple notion, and like evolution itself, it gives rise to a series of fantastic and unsettling conclusions: that the promise of the human-genome project is, in Ewald's words, "considerably overblown"; that "the human health benefits from the study of genetics are tiny compared to the benefits of the study of infection"; that much of the data that will answer the biggest questions in medicine were available at least as far back as the 1940s, before the elucidation of the DNA molecule turned medicine away from answers that were staring it in the face; and that medicine "lacks the courage to pursue the causes of chronic diseases."

Of course, ideas face their own competitive pressures and engage in their own struggle for competitive advantage. Ewald's ideas, in terms of his own preferred framework, have proven more virulent than transmissible; his is still distinctly a minority position. "When I wrote my first paper, I thought it would instantly transform medicine," he says. "But even now if you suggest to the Alzheimer's people that a pathogen causes Alzheimer's, they laugh. If you tell the flu community that they're wrong about the pandemic, they're just dismissive. Then, if you ask them why they're dismissive, they get angry. Cancer researchers are the same way. They sneer at you, even though the three biggest breakthroughs in cancer research over the last thirty years have been in this vastly underfunded avenue of research."

The breakthroughs are the discovery that hepatitis B and C cause liver cancer; that the same bacteria that causes peptic ulcers causes stomach cancers; that the human papillomavirus causes cervical cancers. Evolution favors the long view, and Ewald is convinced that the long view favors his ideas, because since humankind figured out that germs caused disease, "there has never been a time when the spectrum of diseases acknowledged to be caused by infection hasn't been expanding" — because, to name just one example, "in 1970, the percentage of cancers acknowledged to be caused by infection was something like one one-hundredth of a percent. Now it's 20 percent, and rising steadily."

Ewald feels he has evolutionary biology on his side, and so he is imperturbable. Five years ago he published not only a list of the diseases he believes will be found to have their origins in infection, but also the dates when the fact of the infectious origin will be medically accepted. Head and neck cancers (2010). Childhood leukemia (2015). Breast cancer (2015). Schizophrenia (2020). Type 2 diabetes (2025). Bipolar depression (2025). In fifty years, he says, humankind will finally be able to do something about them, using the same techniques — the vaccines, the antibiotics, and the hygienic improvements — that have proven so successful with so many other infections. And then? "We will realize that the diseases we thought of as diseases of old age were actually caused by pathogens. And once we get rid of them, there is no evolutionary reason we shouldn't be very healthy all the way into our mid to late nineties, when it is in evolution's interest to program our bodies to fall apart."

It sounds too simple. No, it sounds reductive — a naive utopianism based on understandings science has long outgrown. The human-genome project seems less a scientific project than some kind of realization of our own evolutionary destiny... and here comes Paul Ewald promoting the idea that everything is caused by germs? "Real advances generally turn out to be pretty simple," Ewald says. "People don't want them to be, because then they've been beating their brains out for nothing. They'll look pretty stupid." He insists that he is no true believer, that his only true belief is in science and its ability to draw distinctions between true beliefs and beliefs that actually turn out to be true. He is not just a theorist; he has a lab, and he performs experiments intended either to prove or to disprove his alternative hypothesis. Currently he is involved in an experiment that takes advantage of the immunosuppression that occurs during the menstrual cycle to determine if what causes PMS is actually a pulse of chronic infection.

It is an ambitious experiment. But since Ewald is an evolutionary biologist, the success of his ideas ultimately rests on the experiments conducted by nature itself, and right now nature is conducting one of terrifying ambition and scope in the farms and markets of east Asia. The hype surrounding the H5N1 influenza has proven itself to be both virulent and transmissible in humans; if H5N1 itself is as successful in its adaptive strategies, nature will have its apocalyptic reckoning. There will be riots at vaccination centers. There will be a quarantine enforced at the point of a gun. Moreover, Paul Ewald will be proven wrong, although, as he says, "people who have been predicting a major pandemic have been wrong for thirty years. I've been right for fifteen, even though the flu community has been just as critical of me. At some point, though, we have to look at the track record. Who has the right answer and who doesn't? And how many years have to pass before the right answer is right? Five? Ten? Fifty? If fifty years pass and there is no pandemic, will I be considered right, or will people say that we're still due?"

He will most likely be dead by then. Most of us will be, from an infection we caught somewhere, maybe from the pandemic of chronic disease, or maybe just from a chicken at the local supermarket.

http://www.esquire.com/features/best-n-bri...LD_244?src=digg

Girlfriend's scheduled to do Cancun turns next month.

No confirmed cases, let alone deaths, in Cancún.

Besides, the disease has already crossed into the US. There are cases in NYC, California, Texas and Kansas. Might as well go to Cancun now, while the demand is low.

I'll never forget the girl that did a "Cancun turn" for me. good times