[lit-ideas] Re: Protect the patents!
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2005 22:55:46 -0500
> [Original Message]
> From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 11/3/2005 7:33:06 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Protect the patents!
>
> > Where are they getting their information I wonder? I've heard no
> > predictions at all except that the virus is now 50% of where it needs
to be
> > in order to be person to person transmissible.
>
> This last sentence makes no biological or 'scientific' sense at all.
> (Are you ascribing purpose to a virus?) Could you explain to us what it
> means, or even what it might possibly mean?
>
I'm not a virologist (I read the 50% figure, don't remember where), but I
do know that viruses are strange things. They're neither dead nor alive.
They are little bundles of DNA surrounded by a protein coat, and nothing
more. Their sole "purpose" in life, their reason for being, is to find
host cells to take over to propagate their own DNA. At the moment, the
virus according to what I read is 50% of the way mutated to being readily
transmissible from person to person. It's now only readily transmissible
among birds, and has very low transmissibility from birds to humans, as you
note below.
> Can you explain what the consequences would be if a genetic change in
> the HN51 strain of avian flu were to make it readily transmissible from
> human to human?
It would become extremely contagious and then act like any flu virus. It's
introduced into the body from hand to nose or eyes, possibly mouth too. I
can't remember if it's also transmitted through the air. (I know TB is
airborne.) I'll look it up over the weekend. The problem in addition to
its being extremely contagious (to the point where even handling things
like money is dangerous) is that it's a brand new virus, so absolutely no
one has any immunity to it. It's like when Columbus introduced measles
into the New World. Same thing with bubonic plague. It was brand new,
nobody had any immunity to it.
It is already transmissible, but not robustly, from
> birds and from the environment (bird fesces, etc.) to humans. The number
> of human cases, in proportion to the number of infected birds, is
> minuscule; the number of human fatalities among these is even more
> minusculer, as Einstein would say.
>
> (I grant that WHO has said it is 'only a matter of time' before
> bird-human transmission happens, but so what?)
So what nothing. Once it becomes easily transmissible is when the fun
starts. I'd like to be with Phil. I'd even like to think this was a
conspiracy to take attention off of Scooter, but it's the real deal.
Unless culling 15-20% of the Asian stock of fowl is being done to protect
Scooter.
Andy Amago
I'm with Phil Enns on
> this one.
>
> Robert Paul
> Reed College
>
>
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