Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Henry Niman who wrote (53662)	9/25/2004 6:13:43 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Henry, I've been reading your posts about H5N1 and keeping an eye out. I don't understand these bugs much, but it seems odd that somebody can catch them, which means they work on us as well as birds, but unlike similar bugs such as sars, colds, flus etc they don't move along the chain of humans with sneezing, touching and general contamination. Meanwhile, sars was bad enough, but the kill rate of humans by H5N1 is very bad for insurance companies. Not to mention bad for the people who catch it. If it becomes rampant, with a 70% kill rate, cdc.gov compared with sars at 10% [or maybe a bit more depending on how it's counted], the depopulation effect will make dark ages bubonic plague look like a joke. There will be some very rapid and dramatic cultural shifts involving serious reduction in human to human contact. Kissing will go out of fashion in a big way. People will bow like Japanese, from a nice, safe distance, while wearing masks and preferably communicate only via cyberspace and CDMA devices. I suppose something like half a population would become infected during an epidemic and of those, about half would die [or more], so there could be a 30% reduction in population in a couple of years. That's not good for real estate prices either. Nor oil prices. Nor a lot more besides. Is that the possible scale of catastrophe that we're facing? I suppose it would be less because of dramatic propagation control actions, and then a string of vaccines would be invented. But disruption and death could be phenomenal even so. And I thought I was living in the good times - silly me. Even without H5N1, or whatever it converts to in the recombinant DNA factory, Jay's TeoTwawki is threatened so there is supposedly enough to be going on with. Mqurice