Henry, thanks for detailing what's happening.
It must be time to buy one's own ventilator, thermometers, high filtration breathing equipment, lay in supplies to avoid visiting crowded places and generally batten down the hatches for next northern winter.
With viral infections, is the degree of infection and outcome related to the initial dose?
I guess that if one got a single viral particle instead of a lung full of aerosol from somebody's nearby sneeze, the outcome would be quite different in that by the time the single virus had multiplied and spread through one's body, the immune system would have had a chance to gear up, recognize the invader and start to do something about it.
By inhaling a lung full of aerosol, the virus would have destroyed every available cell before the defending host's immune system knew that anything was happening. It takes something like three days to gear up fully if my understanding is correct. The initial immune response defences aren't the really tough ones [as I understand it].
I should ask Google and do some reading.
My point is, maybe I'll get hold of a reasonably benign sars virus and put it in a pinhole in my skin, to prime my immune system up to expect this sort of thing. First I'll reduce it by homeopathic dilution so that there's only a few of them. I'll gradually increase the dose until I force a reaction. Then I could get rich as a front line hospital worker, immune to the virus.
I noticed that the UN World Health Organisation seemed to downplay sars as though it was detracting from attention to the currently more serious diseases. It's true that malaria is a biggie, but sars has potential for much more mayhem than malaria because global economic disaster could happen as well as the actual disease effects. In general, medical people seem to adopt a reassuring line and minimalist approach, assuming that the good and more common outcome is the one to expect, which lets the bad stuff through and situations to deteriorate before the alarm bells start ringing. Meningitis is a good example - the assumption is too often that it's just flu, rather than assuming the worst until proven it can't be. Unfortunately, that approach leads to broken o-rings in space shuttles and all sorts of mayhem.
It took only a bit of white powder and a couple of anthrax infections to panic the USA and disrupt things somewhat. Imagine if many millions of people are suffering sars and billions are suffering the fear of it.
Hmmm, while I haven't been watching, there are now 916 deaths from sars. who.int
Mqurice |
