Tiger, you have it completely backasswards. Viruses always trend towards becoming milder not more virulent. Biologically, virulence is self-limiting. Kill the host, you die too. So much for being able to spread your virulence.
The milder flu is genetically more successful, so it wins in the end.
The only way to spread true virulence is to do it intentionally, by human intervention. I will let you fill in the blanks.
It will die out eventually as Spanish flu did. Virulent one thrives when it can spread to next hosts quickly and easily before it kill original hosts.
Virulent mass killing virus is a transitory phenomenon, but it has to show up somewhere. If the host sample size is big, the odds of actual occurrence, even a single one, would be going up. I was simply talking about this elementary statistical observation.
Virulence is self-limiting in the long-term, but in the short-term, it could be different. Things can tend toward relatively benign long-term equilibrium but the path to get there could be far less benign.
“The only way to spread true virulence is to do it intentionally, by human intervention. I will let you fill in the blanks.”
Reading this might help them too.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2281436/posts
“Biologically, virulence is self-limiting. Kill the host, you die too. So much for being able to spread your virulence.”
Never thought of that. Thanks for the microbiology lesson.
It is also possible that those who have contracted the present form of the virus will gain some immunity even to a later mutation that is more virulent.
OTOH, the UK health authorities must be worried if they have, up til now, been giving Tamiflu to those exposed. I would have thought that they would invoke cost effectiveness to limit it to those with symptoms. However, I am unsure about Tamiflu’s overall effectiveness as a preventive. My understanding, which is limited to popular media reports,is that it can lessen symptoms, not prevent actual development of the flu. Is that incorrect? What is the effect on the transmission capabilities of H1N1 of giving Tamiflu early?
I read early on that the present variant was a bird/swine/human hybrid. Then there was a flood of reports stating that no avian component was found. I stopped following the news, even ProMed, once it was obvious that this was a very mild influenza. Do you know what the current assessment is, as to genetic elements contained in this H1N1? Again, I am just an interested layperson, but some articles make a lot of the fact that a tri-species genetic component indicated
bio-engineering. Can you add anything to that?