Saturday, October 08, 2005
Avian Flu Fear Mongering
The New York Times today has an editorial that you don't have to pay $50 to read. I think it leaves out one important point and says something else which has little scientific support. Here's the former:
The two most recent global pandemics, in 1957 and 1968, were caused by human flu viruses that picked up some bird flu components. Now it turns out that the far more lethal 1918 virus, which killed perhaps 20 to 100 million people, was most likely an avian strain that jumped directly into humans. That gives today's avian strain two routes to wreak havoc among humans. It could either mix some of its genes with human influenza, like the 1957 and 1968 viruses, or it could mutate on its own to become easily transmissible among humans, like the 1918 virus.
The NYT makes it sound like the two paths make it twice as likely that the flu will turn pandemic-like. There are always two paths for every virus to become deadly to humans. And there are always a hundred thousand paths that lead to non-lethality to humans. Because the virus can mutate in a hundred thousand ways and is constantly in the process of doing so at random.
The next suspect statement is: So far, the avian virus has rarely jumped from birds to humans and seldom spread from one human to another. But it may be traveling slowly down the same evolutionary path as the 1918 virus.
There is no such thing as an evolutionary path. In hindsight, we can see how an organism like an animal changed over time (or didn't change-- some animals, like sharks and horseshoe crabs, have changed very little over hundreds of millions of years--if they were on a path, it was very short). But our hindsight, usually fossil record, view doesn't mean that the organism here, the H5N1 virus, is doing anything other than mutating at random. Think of viruses as nano-hypodermic needles filled with genetic material which can make many more nano-hypodermic needles by taking over a cell's RNA protein factory. There is no brain, no volition, there isn't even a method of movement--the virus just runs into the cell by accident. The virus doesn't want to jump to humans, it just 'wants' to produce more of itself (like all life). About the avian flu, about all viruses, the best we can say is alea iacta est and wait to see if the die comes up like the 1918 pandemic or like the 1976 swine flu. I've posted before about fear mongering regarding this virus here.
The two most recent global pandemics, in 1957 and 1968, were caused by human flu viruses that picked up some bird flu components. Now it turns out that the far more lethal 1918 virus, which killed perhaps 20 to 100 million people, was most likely an avian strain that jumped directly into humans. That gives today's avian strain two routes to wreak havoc among humans. It could either mix some of its genes with human influenza, like the 1957 and 1968 viruses, or it could mutate on its own to become easily transmissible among humans, like the 1918 virus.
The NYT makes it sound like the two paths make it twice as likely that the flu will turn pandemic-like. There are always two paths for every virus to become deadly to humans. And there are always a hundred thousand paths that lead to non-lethality to humans. Because the virus can mutate in a hundred thousand ways and is constantly in the process of doing so at random.
The next suspect statement is: So far, the avian virus has rarely jumped from birds to humans and seldom spread from one human to another. But it may be traveling slowly down the same evolutionary path as the 1918 virus.
There is no such thing as an evolutionary path. In hindsight, we can see how an organism like an animal changed over time (or didn't change-- some animals, like sharks and horseshoe crabs, have changed very little over hundreds of millions of years--if they were on a path, it was very short). But our hindsight, usually fossil record, view doesn't mean that the organism here, the H5N1 virus, is doing anything other than mutating at random. Think of viruses as nano-hypodermic needles filled with genetic material which can make many more nano-hypodermic needles by taking over a cell's RNA protein factory. There is no brain, no volition, there isn't even a method of movement--the virus just runs into the cell by accident. The virus doesn't want to jump to humans, it just 'wants' to produce more of itself (like all life). About the avian flu, about all viruses, the best we can say is alea iacta est and wait to see if the die comes up like the 1918 pandemic or like the 1976 swine flu. I've posted before about fear mongering regarding this virus here.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 7:27 AM 
