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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: redfish who wrote (6245)	1/26/2004 12:52:04 PM
From: zonder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

Look what a few hundred deaths from SARs did to Hong Kong, and imagine it coming back every year. It wouldn't take too much to throw the modern world into chaos. Hm. Sorry, I must have misunderstood. I thought you were referring to humans being eradicated from earth, rather than economic loss or "chaos". Also I don't think you can assume that modern medicine is all good and no bad Never assumed that. Never even assumed we have the cure to every illness past, present, and future. Eradicating smallpox was a wonderful thing, saved millions of lives, but if smallpox were to be unleashed again, the effects would be worse than ever because most of us have never been exposed to it and lack natural immunity. I don't think your argument works very well here because we actually have a vaccine for smallpox and stockpiles of it. The only reason why every baby is not vaccinated against smallpox is because the vaccine itself is lethal in a very small percentage of the population. The minute it breaks out, there will be mass vaccinations. And what is "modern medicine" supposed to do? NOT eradicate diseases and let them kill chunks of the population so that the remainder will be keep their immunity? A better example for your "modern medicine can do harm, too" would be the way very resistant bacteria (even antibiotic-resistant strains) have emerged over the past decade or so because of excessive use of antibiotics against germs that we can get over without them. Every year we come up with a vaccine to counter the latest strain of flu Not really. Flu vaccines of a particular year are developed on the basis of the PREVIOUS YEAR's most prevalent couple of strains. Hence, they may be completely irrelevant to this year. This is why vaccination does not work for viruses - because the virus has a nasty habit of changing all the time. We have seen a point of diminishing returns with antibiotics, who is to say the same may not happen with vaccines A lot of people, myself included, can safely say that. It's not a big deal. Antibiotics work as well as before against certain strains, but don't work as well or even not at all against the newer strains that have evolved because they have been in contact with antibiotics. Basically in the long run, as we try to kill them, most die and the few that survive learn to deal with the antibiotics we set loose on them, changing into a more dangerous strain. With vaccines, the process is different. You isolate and weaken the microbe. You inject it into the healthy person (vaccination). The microbe in the vaccine is too weak to cause infection but is enough for the person to form antibodies to combat it, which remains in the bloodstream and watch out for when the real microbe comes knocking. That is, as long as the microbe remains the same (as they tend to do), vaccination will always work :-) From your lack of commentary, I assume you did not read the Wired article I posted. You really should. It is very interesting and will probably give you lots of new stuff to worry about...