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To: robertpaulsen
I thought mutations took millions of years.

No, they don't. From the time it took migratory birds to fly from Russia to Ukraine, they picked up a mutation. And by the way, with the lottery, you don't have trillions of tickets (individual virus) to play with. Also, when you get a number right with the lottery, it probably won't be right the next time. With H5N1, every "number" it guesses clicks into place, and it goes for the next mutation.
7 posted on 02/11/2006 8:39:51 AM PST by Termite_Commander (Warning: Cynical Right-winger Ahead)
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To: Termite_Commander

Not hardly. Thirtysome years ago my high school science fair project started out to demonstrate the ability of bacteria to selectively breed adaptations, specifically, I tried to get a strain of innocuous e.Coli resistant to penicillen. That turned out to be so easy, I went for the rest of the sensitivity disc I was using on agar plates. By the time my Dad, a veterinarian, checked up on my little project, my bugs were growing all over all but one of the antibiotics available to me, five out of six.

Dad turned a little pale, gathered up all my glassware, sealed it in a bag and took it to necropsy, where he thoroughly incinerated everything.

Mind you, this is well before gene splicing, purely natural selection. With populations in the kazillions, microbes mutate FAST, viruses an order of magnitude faster than bacteria.

IMHO we are wasting huge sums on Tamiflu, utterly unproven, and there is no way to gin up a vaccine for a virus that doesn't exist yet.

Personal level, THE most effective thing anyone can do is be prepared (food water, neccessities of all kinds) for a total, and I mean TOTAL quarantine for up to a month at least. No need to head for the moutaintop, this can be done at home, but to be effective will require absolute denial of personal contact with anyone outside the quarantined household. Then if you are fortunate enough not to have a disease vector in your own household when you begin, you're fine. Forget the plastic and duct tape, this is a communicable virus, not nerve gas or weaponized anthrax powder. Just stay home (actually I could go out in the yard if no one else is around), stay calm, and stay the hell away from anyone outside your quarantine.


27 posted on 02/11/2006 9:08:05 AM PST by barkeep
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