(no subject)

[minervasolo]

It's reaching a point where this bird flu thing is getting laughable. Maybe it is a big danger, but all these articles sort of peter out mid way through when they have to admit what has happend, as opposed to what might happen.

"The virus found in birds in Romania and Turkey is the same deadly H5N1 strain that has killed 60 people in Asia."

Now forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't the population of Asia rather, well, higher than that? Like, so much so that in percentage terms we've got a couple of decimal places in there? As opposed to 50-750,000 people in Britain will die, in terms of percentages?

"But scientists insist there is no need to panic because the virus is only deadly if it mutates into a form that can be passed between humans."

Which means, basically, that it might never even happen. Currently, it's like BSE. Something you really, really don't want, but something that if you're careful you won't catch.

The problem is, there probably is a fairly large threat here, one that could wipe out swathes of the population, but fear-mongering isn't scaring any one. It's just... obvious hyperbole. SARS didn't turn out to be the pandemic we were warned to brace oursevles for either. All these stats are based on one simple assumption - it evolves into an easily transmitted human-to-uman strain. So far, it hasn't. It doesn't, therefore, need to take up the top news spot every single day when there are considerably more people than the birdflu estimates dying thanks to an earthquake.

---

Latin, though was great! I'm feeling all smug now, because I'm still good at Latin. I know four out of five people in my group (inc me, there), and I'm one of three who didn't do Latin last year. My grammar notes are all fine and good (and might even help me avoid buying a grammar book) and we are studying texts I've done before, such as the Aeneid.

I <3 latin! ^_^

Comments

[lieutenanth.livejournal.com]

"so far it hasn't" - well no, but someone in that article is claiming that a pandemic is inevitable, and something that's a) inevitable and b) going to kill ~0.1%-~1.25% of the UK population (and terrorists, remember, have killed < 0.00001 of the UK population) is pretty worrying. When avian flu finally goes human-human, you can probably expect large swathes of Asia to die because of it - they just haven't yet because it hasn't mutated yet.

Yay :/

[voidssong.livejournal.com]

And it won't just be in Asia - the 1918 epidemic (Pandemics hadn't been invented back then) covered most of the world, something like 25-50 million people died in one year. Since we have no effective defense and no way of preventing the mutation it is just a matter of time, but as Nat says, since it hasn't actually happened yet we could focus attention more effectively on events that are actually killing people today.