Bye bye birdie?

January 26, 2006 9:38 PM

University of Pittsburgh scientists say they've genetically engineered an avian flu vaccine that has proven 100 percent effective in mice and chickens. Let's hope this is for real and we can go back to worrying about global warming and the American police-state.
posted by lupus_yonderboy (46 comments total)

I know I'm going to get some flak for this, but I've come around to thinking that a pandemic would actually do a great service to humanity just about now. It would focus our attentions away from shitting on each other and improve the chances that we not wipe each other out through more violent means or through poisoning our own food supply.

How fucked up do things have to be on this planet to consider the above 'wishful thinking'?
posted by Kickstart70 at 10:52 PM on January 26, 2006

Good news for the mice and chickens. May they enjoy their unfettered rein of the earth as we sneeze our way into the afterlife.
posted by Rothko at 10:53 PM on January 26, 2006

Kickstart70 wrote "How fucked up do things have to be on this planet to consider the above...?"


posted by Eideteker at 11:28 PM on January 26, 2006

Kickstart:

So fucked up that you stop caring about who would be affected by such an event?

End crime by killing the victims!
posted by dsword at 11:29 PM on January 26, 2006

...and by "who would be," I meant "which groups would most likely be."

But whatever. I'm with Eideteker, I guess.
posted by dsword at 11:32 PM on January 26, 2006

Without a panic triggered by a pandemic, how will we ever justify our American police-state?
posted by sourwookie at 11:35 PM on January 26, 2006

I'm gonna have to go back and read that series again now.
Glad I kept a copy on my laptop.
posted by nightchrome at 11:39 PM on January 26, 2006

There's much more detail and background on this story HERE.
posted by numlok at 12:19 AM on January 27, 2006

Is it really science if it's befuggered with goooogle ads?
I for one welcome our, ah whateve
posted by undule at 12:52 AM on January 27, 2006

I would just like to take a brief moment to note that the phrase "avian flu" is, as a matter of aesthetics, quite beautiful in a chiefly aural way.

What am I going to do with my six-month supply of canned goods, bottled water, duct tape, and bio suits? Well, I guess there's still a chance the government(s) will be unwilling to foot the enormous costs of vaccinating everyone.
posted by The God Complex at 1:29 AM on January 27, 2006

Mission accomplished.
posted by paulsc at 3:57 AM on January 27, 2006

.










(aw, somebody was gonna do it....)
posted by paulsc at 4:12 AM on January 27, 2006

I'm glad there's a vaccine. Now the media can try to cause a panic about another contagious disease that we'll never get.
posted by Mayor Curley at 4:14 AM on January 27, 2006

I really hope this isn't true... There are far too many people on this planet, and this was going to cull them/us out, possibly solve or at least dampen a lot of problems ranging from the environment to poverty to even our social security worries.

The bubonic plagues ended the feudal system and ignited the Renaissance, ended the dark ages and spurned a new era of discovery. The impending pandemic has the potential to devastate especially those overcrowded regions where religious fundamentalism and poverty nest, solving two problems through attacking a third - overpopulation.

Someone has to say it.
posted by stewiethegreat at 4:36 AM on January 27, 2006

You malthusian freaks ! Bubonic plague didn't cause Renaissance ..but it caused specialized labour to decrease and generic labour to decrease even more thus making both more powerful and helping the creation of the first guilds and corporations.....

....wait a minute ! If basic needs are taken care of, people will become more powerful...mmmhhh..these sociocommuliberals were after some good idea !
posted by elpapacito at 4:59 AM on January 27, 2006

Hong Kong? Vietnam? China?

"I'd like to teach the world to sneeze," eh, Stewiethegreat?

(Reference to a VERY old Coke ad!)
posted by Jody Tresidder at 5:03 AM on January 27, 2006

"This means that this recombinant vaccine can stimulate several lines of defense against the H5N1 virus, giving it greater therapeutic value. More importantly, it suggests that even if H5N1 mutates, the vaccine is still likely to be effective against it. How effective, we are not sure," Dr. Barratt-Boyes cautioned. "We won't know until that occurs."

I still don't understand how you can create a vaccine for a strain of virus that doesn't exist yet. Sounds like they're throwing darts and hoping they've got it right - granted, they're EDUCATED darts.
posted by matty at 5:04 AM on January 27, 2006

but it caused specialized labour to decrease and generic labour to decrease even more thus making both more powerful

Exactly. Because it made labour rarer, it also made workers more valuable. This meant that the powerful had to give fairer wages to labour. These higher wages also lead to the creation of more middle class trades, which is generally good for society. Of course, the plague sucked for the people who actually died from it. But society overall actually benefited. It's an ill wind that blows no good.
posted by unreason at 6:12 AM on January 27, 2006

Abstract at JVI
posted by rxrfrx at 6:13 AM on January 27, 2006

Another reason not to cry chicken little about this: nobody really has any idea about the actual mortality of this virus.

It's high in people going to the doctors for flu-like symptoms. What is unknown is how many people get mild symptoms and just write it off as an ordinary cold or flu.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 6:16 AM on January 27, 2006

I hope you all die. Then I can rule this planet the way it was meant to be.
posted by graventy at 6:30 AM on January 27, 2006

I bet it only works on white mice and chickens.
[ducking]
posted by nofundy at 6:42 AM on January 27, 2006

matty, I wondered about that, too. I think the annual flu shot program uses the same approach -- here's the likely candidates, here's what we have against them. That program is supposed to be 70-90% effective in suppressing symptoms in young, healthy adults (not as great for the elderly). I'm not optimistic that this 100% immunity claimed for test animals can be replicated in humans, but even 70% immunity would be some relief given all the hype about the devastating potential of the avian flu. But how long would it take to test, manufacture and distribute the vaccine?

I just may lock myself up in the house until 2008.
posted by rosemere at 6:43 AM on January 27, 2006

I still don't understand how you can create a vaccine for a strain of virus that doesn't exist yet. Sounds like they're throwing darts and hoping they've got it right - granted, they're EDUCATED darts.
posted by matty at 5:04 AM PST on January 27 [!]

Matty, couldn't agree more.

Then there's still the "six months until a vaccine is ready for the public" timeline that's generally touted to worry about.

Frankly, I think the crappy results being reported in the field about the drug Tamiflu (doesn't do much for H5N1, so forget stockpiling) are behind this "announcement".
posted by Jody Tresidder at 6:50 AM on January 27, 2006

Now the media can try to cause a panic about another contagious disease that we'll never get.

I think that's only partially true. Most of the stories I followed were spokespeople from the CDC and other orgs going out and trying to whip up a frenzy without really providing any real suggestions for a plan of action. It seemed pretty pointless to say that up to 3% of us are going to die, and that ecnomies will be ruined, and not provide anything resembling a recommendation of what we should be doing. Other than to buy lots and lots of water, and duct tape.

The media was just doing what it always does:

Tonight on KING5, Will Bird Flu Kill you? Tomorrow? But first, a story about a girl from Renton whose second cousin once hosted a foreign exchange student who broke her wrist in last November's Iran earthquake
posted by psmealey at 7:06 AM on January 27, 2006

The worst likely pandemic wouldn't do anything appreciable to reduce human loads on the earth's ecosystem. In a really, really, REALLY bad scenario, we might see a 20% reduction in world population. (REALLY bad.) That would almost certainly be followed by a population boomlet (or downright boom), as people felt driven to compensate for their loss.

OTOH, the human cost of such a pandemic would hardly stop at those dead from disease. See elpapacito's comment above for one example of how consequences could ramify, and that's a relatively positive spin on it: The flip side is that the world would be radicaly shaken up.

Aside: I know some of y'all are joking about the "unifying" effects of a great disaster, but I just have to say: That kind of mental masturbation god-playing has really started to irritate me over the past couple of decades. I used to buy into it, big time, when I was younger. I used to advocate a three-way "world domination" treaty amongst the superpowers -- I felt it would give us a common ground on which to communicate with one another. But it's quite absurd enough to suppose that one could actually guess the consequences; it takes the overweening arrogance of an Ozymandias to think you understand what those consequences actually mean to the people who actually experience them.

Just think of it this way: This is how Paul Wolfowitz thinks.
posted by lodurr at 7:08 AM on January 27, 2006

Um, having RTFA, did anyone claim a vaccine for a virus strain that does not exist yet?
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:10 AM on January 27, 2006

Yay! Good job Pitt. Now not only arer we home to the polio vaccine, but now the Bird Flu vaccine, too. And people diss on state schools.
posted by matkline at 7:14 AM on January 27, 2006

From a risk assessment conducted by Merrill-Lynch et al. on a pandemic:

"These impacts might include the disruption of supply chains and trade flows; an exacerbation of financial imbalances and the transformation of intellectual property regimes for pharmaceutical products; rioting to gain access to scarce supplies of antivirals and vaccines; a collapse of public order; partial de-urbanisation as people flee population centres; the extinction of trust in governments; decimation of specific human skill sets; and forced, large-scale migration, associated with the further collapse of already weak states."

It added: "In such a scenario, the impact on society might be as profound as that which followed the Black Death in Europe in 1348. That plague caused a fundamental transformation of socio-economic relations in Europe."

From here.

And note that this development does not solve the real problem with providing a vaccine against an emergent pandemic strain: Making enough drugs to cover a significant part of the human population. That still has to be done the ol' fashioned way, with an awful lot of chicken eggs and (relatively) an awful lot of time. Also, as this vaccine has yet to be tested on humans, there's no guarantee that it will work and no guarantee that this vaccine won't need unusually large doses to be adequately immunogenic, like the currently-in-testing H5N1 human vaccines.
posted by docgonzo at 7:15 AM on January 27, 2006

Can I be the first to pledge that I will not riot for pharmaceutical products should the worst come to pass?
posted by psmealey at 7:20 AM on January 27, 2006

If there was a 20% reduction in the human race....rich people WOULDN'T be that 20%.
In fact, I think...poor people? Yeah! They'd be the ones to bite it. Unless you can come up with a disease triggered by a combination of cocaine, diamonds and golf clubs, any pandemic is just going to kill some of the lower economic classes.
posted by 235w103 at 7:25 AM on January 27, 2006

234w103, until they start building hermetically sealed communities in Greenwich, Beacon Hill, Lake Bluff and Marin County, a pandemic that claims 20% of the population will affect the rich in equal proportions. You can bet that the poor will suffer more of the secondary effects of the pandemic (difficulty of removing corpes, water and food supply chain disruptions), but the wealthy don't have much to protect them from initial infection either.
posted by psmealey at 7:31 AM on January 27, 2006

Are people in this thread actually calling for the deaths of millions of people or at least suggesting that it might be a "good thing"? I thought that was a no-no.
posted by Witty at 7:36 AM on January 27, 2006

.... a disease triggered by a combination of cocaine, diamonds and golf clubs ....

Now there's a concept....

psmealey: .... a pandemic that claims 20% of the population will affect the rich in equal proportions.

Er -- no.

First, you stipulate that it won't, in the sentence following: "You can bet that the poor will suffer more of the secondary effects...." Secondary effects are probably more important than the primary effects.

Second, it's just obviously not true. The wealthy will be able to buy vaccination; they will be able to buy separate living spaces that are removed from easy aerosol contact with infected persons, which will radically reduce the likelihood of contracting infection. (The bird-to-human vector isn't ever likely to be easy enough to be the primary vector.)

Third, the wealthy will be better able to profit from the secondary effects. And some of them will.

Whenever we understand the real causes of something -- e.g., now that we have a pretty good understanding of disease vectors -- it becomes feasible for wealthy people to buy some measure of control over those things, unless you actively work to subvert that control. And I don't hear that being suggested. Though it might be a good idea...

(Alas, "the wealthy" in this discussion ends up being a bit of a straw man. "The wealthy" should really be "the powerful": Senior Republican Party officials, "important" corporate personnel or government officials, etc. They are a subset of the wealthy, and membership in that subset is not necessarily conferred by wealth alone.)
posted by lodurr at 7:41 AM on January 27, 2006

Okay... I flubbed separating out the primary and secondary effects from that 20% number. If the 20% is the total overall effect, then yes, I agree, it will effect the poor disproportionately. But what you say doesn't necessarily jibe with what I've learned about pandemics over the past couple of years.

The wealthy will be able to buy vaccination; they will be able to buy separate living spaces that are removed from easy aerosol contact with infected persons, which will radically reduce the likelihood of contracting infection.

To date, there is no evidence that any vaccine will work with any reliability on any humans at all in this event, so their ability to buy vaccination will have little and any impact.

Secondly, if the pandemic comes, it will happen so fast, that there will scarcely be time to run to the mansion in the woods, away from infected populace. Most of the models I have read about indicate that there will be outbreaks of flu almost simultaneously in major populations centers as well as rural locales. Mr. Wall Street on Vesey Street will be every bit as likely to be infected during the period of time as the hotdog vendor at Church and Broadway.
posted by psmealey at 7:52 AM on January 27, 2006

Sorry... I am actually a bit groggy with flu this morning myself, so that's some piss poor proofreading on my part. What I meant to say was that Mr. Wall Street CEO on Vesey street, not just any guy on Wall Street.
posted by psmealey at 7:55 AM on January 27, 2006

AFAIK, there's no evidence for that kind of ultra-rapid spread outside of thrillers and fantasy novels. The 1918 flu was highly virulent; in real terms, there wasn't much less human mobility within a city back then than there is now, so under your scenario we should have expected massive infection, and we didn't get it. We got really high infection and casualty rates, but we did not see the kind of rapid spread you're scenarizing.

Why? Lots of factors. I'm not a vector biologist, but I've talked with a vector biologist on a number of occasions about just this subject, and I've also read a bit on it, and this is what I can bring off the top of my head:

• Even aerosol-vectored pathogens just aren't that tough -- they often can't retain enough physical integrity after being passed through the open air in order to reliably infect the new host. So the aerosol vector still requires a fairly close contact.
• See KirkJobSluder's comments, above, and realize that a big reason for the high lethality of the 1918 flu was the lack of medical care. We have much better medical care now -- we can treat symptoms more effectively than we could, which means a dramatically improved chance of recovery, which means that a larger proportion of the active living population is immune and can no longer vector the disease, which makes the disease less likely to vector well after a shorter period of time than in 1918.
• High lethality is not adaptive for an infectious disease. Given enough time, the disease will adapt to be less lethal. Yes, it's possible that the disease could spread rapidly enough and have a high enough lethality rate (you'd need both) to overcome that tendency, but this isn't a Stephen King novel and avian flu is not God's Plan for the rapture.
• Very rapid spread models require the assumption of extremely efficient vectoring. In practice, vectoring is hardly ever that efficient, even under the most amenable conditions.

posted by lodurr at 8:29 AM on January 27, 2006

Thanks for the explanation, lodurr. That makes a lot of sense.

BTW, I swear I didn't imagine that model or take it from a Stephen King book. I was basing it on what I heard with interviews on NPR with one of the directors of the CDC (still looking for the name, as I cannot recall it) last summer/early fall.
posted by psmealey at 8:50 AM on January 27, 2006

Yeh, my brother (the vector biologist in question) was pretty critical of the things that were being said about avian flu, and especially those comments. It would be bad, yes; lots of us could die or hurt really bad; but the talk from the politically-tinged spokesmen at CDC and in the Executive really smacked of fear-mongering. "Keep 'em scared so they won't ask questions."
posted by lodurr at 9:04 AM on January 27, 2006

Also 2 big differences between now and 1918:

1) a lot less TB and bronchitis.

2) Gatorade
posted by Mick at 9:29 AM on January 27, 2006

Are people in this thread actually calling for the deaths of millions of people or at least suggesting that it might be a "good thing"? I thought that was a no-no.

Call for a waaahmbulance already, baby.
posted by Rothko at 9:46 AM on January 27, 2006

lodurr: Actually, my point was that even without treatment, the actual lethality of this strain is an open question, because we have no idea how many people have been exposed and developed mild symptoms.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 10:26 AM on January 27, 2006

Oh, fine, piss on my post [g /]

Yes, sorry about that. I didn't look back, just referenced it from memory. I remember hearing some epidemiologist saying the same tign on the radio a few weeks back.
posted by lodurr at 12:43 PM on January 27, 2006

Awesome! Having figured it out first, we can SELL it to other countries! OO ESS AY, OO ESS AY
posted by jenovus at 4:14 PM on January 27, 2006

FoFuSa...even I, being I think the first to say that this could benefit humankind, don't think killing millions is a Good Thing. But neither is amputating an arm even when it means saving the person.

Certain peoples' freaking out on this is ridiculous.
posted by Kickstart70 at 9:38 AM on January 28, 2006

I think it's sad that the "freak out" impulse is getting exploited, but I'm pretty sympathetic to the freakers. It's a scary idea. People who understand some of the issues should just stay calm and explain to people that panic isn't helpful and it's not as bad as it sounds.
posted by lodurr at 11:24 AM on January 28, 2006