The Oil Drum

7 comments on Space, the final frontier?

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Roger on January 8, 2006 - 4:04am

This map from BBC also show nicely how the H5N1 strain has spread around the east and is moving towards Europe. Did you know that the spanish flu killed between 50 and 100 million people (6% of the total world population) in the early 1900's? And that the H5N1 virus may follow the same path as the virus that caused the spanish flu?

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Agric on January 8, 2006 - 10:51pm

Now, there are many ifs and buts before that road is trod. Though we are due a flu pandemic and things have made its rapid spread and effect inevitable we are MUCH better prepared than before. Here is a site about the 1918 flu in US, I found it more reassuring than otherwise:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/influenza/

Flu pandemics are funny beasts, as is the virus. I know of no pandemic that has spread direct from birds to humans, pigs seeme to be the inevitable intermediary. Here are some links you might wish to follow:
http://www.eswi.org/
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?dist=&param=archive&siteid=mktw&guid=%7B80E760 E2%2D9CF1%2D437F%2D93BF%2D7F0DF3EE2E30%7D&garden=&minisite=
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay84402/michael-t-osterholm/preparing-for-the-next-pandem ic.html
http://www.truthpublishing.com/survivinginfluenza.html

In truth, we don't know, and won't if / until it mutates to human-human transmission. Until then then the immediate risk is trivial, from then the risk is potentially immense but soon knowable. You can play your own scenarios if you like, do probability distributions for proportion of population infected and kill rates, see what happens. Though it has a 50% approx human kill rate when caught from birds now that is very likely to reduce greatly if it mutates to human-human transmission. It is very unlikely to provide a partial neat solution to resource depletion.