Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.
The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.
So far the false positive rate is 100%.
At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.
*sigh* Such is life, and death...
Looks like the Monte Python movie. Hope it doesn’t spread.
Can you add me to the ping list please?
M-O-O-N - that spells pandemic!
When this last was a big topic of discussion on the site about 9 years ago we spent some time trying to figure out why this “avian” or bird flu was being discussed as such a danger.
In discussing that, we all became educated on the Spanish Influenza outbreak at the close of WWI and how it killed an astounding percentage of people across NA and Europe. These were not infants and elderly, but young, healthy people.
The explanation was that it too was a avian variant which most influenza viruses in humans are not. It had a characteristic of causing the body’s defenses to become part of what overwhelmed an infected individual. The healthy young victim’s response to the initial infection was so strong that many victims drowned in lung response to the infection in what is called a “cytokine storm”. In dealing with such an event a resperator is the only thing that modern medicine can use and we have world wide about 1% of the respirators that would be needed to stop a major outbreak’s death toll.
See this for some more discussion:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Bird-Flu-(Avian-Influenza)-Pandemic,-the-Cytokine-Storm:-What-Drugs-Work-and-Dont-Work&id=207162
The bottom line is that sometimes large healthy populations are the worst mortality rate and this ain’t anything like the Flu we all have known for ever. Tamaflu is ineffective, antibiotics are not able to touch a virus, and we need to understand that if this got into the worst case scenerio — it is a show-stopper.
Please add me to this ping list. Thanks