Rapier108 said:
KidDoc said:
Aggrad08 said:
bmks270 said:
titan said:
This is rather scary. At least China may be more likely to take the stringent measures possibly necessary to tamp something down.
What makes it worse than the flu?
Particularly bad strains of flu can have horrible mortality rates. Look at the Spanish flu for example.
Spanish flu was before modern medicine was widely available. If it pops up again in the modern era it will still be a bad flu but not nearly the same as 1917-1918.
Don't count on that. The Spanish flu has been found to have some very unique properties that are not seen in many flu strains, or if they are, it is just one or two, not the right combination to make it highly lethal.
The CDC found the virus preserved in tissue samples, and from the body of a woman buried in permafrost. When it was reconstituted and injected into monkeys, it killed them in the exact same way it did people by triggering a massive overreaction of the immune system. None of the usual medications used to help with the flu were effective in stopping it.
Disagree:
115PubMedTIAutopsy series of 68 cases dying before and during the 1918 influenza pandemic peak.AUSheng ZM, Chertow DS, Ambroggio X, McCall S, Przygodzki RM, Cunningham RE, Maximova OA, Kash JC, Morens DM, Taubenberger JK SOProc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011;108(39):16416. Epub 2011 Sep 19.
The 1918 to 1919 "Spanish" influenza pandemic virus killed up to 50 million people. We report here clinical, pathological, bacteriological, and virological findings in 68 fatal American influenza/pneumonia military patients dying between May and October of 1918, a period that includes ~4 mo before the 1918 pandemic was recognized, and 2 mo (September-October 1918) during which it appeared and peaked. The lung tissues of 37 of these cases were positive for influenza viral antigens or viral RNA, including four from the prepandemic period (May-August). The prepandemic and pandemic peak cases were indistinguishable clinically and pathologically.
All 68 cases had histological evidence of bacterial pneumonia, and 94% showed abundant bacteria on Gram stain. Sequence analysis of the viral hemagglutinin receptor-binding domain performed on RNA from 13 cases suggested a trend from a more "avian-like" viral receptor specificity with G222 in prepandemic cases to a more "human-like" specificity associated with D222 in pandemic peak cases. Viral antigen distribution in the respiratory tree, however, was not apparently different between prepandemic and pandemic peak cases, or between infections with viruses bearing different receptor-binding polymorphisms. The 1918 pandemic virus was circulating for at least 4 mo in the United States before it was recognized epidemiologically in September 1918. The causes of the unusually high mortality in the 1918 pandemic were not explained by the pathological and virological parameters examined. These findings have important implications for understanding the origins and evolution of pandemic influenza viruses.
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