Diseases and Plagues

[TnWatchdog]

One of these days a super bug will evolve or scientists may help it evolve and we will end up in a similar situation as the movie, "The Stand". It will spread like wildfire and we will be history, at least most of us.
The GuardianDeadly New Virus Found in Humans
In a report released Thursday, the CDC warned against a virus -- that had previously not been seen in humans -- that has killed 8.
Where the outbreak has been seen

 

[TnWatchdog]

We need Genocide to happen, look at the Earth these days. Everything is overfarmed, and overpopulated. We don't have "population control" maybe this is how it gets introduced... I didn't get mine either. Luckily I haven't been sick in over 3 years. Whatever happens I just want it to happen soon.

Hey Loopi, this post of yours reminds me of a guy up in Minnesota a few years back. He was complaining about the traffic in St Paul during the State Fair and said that we needed a plague as there were too many people and not enough roads. I asked him what if the plague took him out, he said...oh well, whatever. Just thought about that today...thanks for the memories!

 

[BlastTyrant]

We need Genocide to happen, look at the Earth these days. Everything is overfarmed, and overpopulated. We don't have "population control" maybe this is how it gets introduced... I didn't get mine either. Luckily I haven't been sick in over 3 years. Whatever happens I just want it to happen soon.

Hey Loopi, this post of yours reminds me of a guy up in Minnesota a few years back. He was complaining about the traffic in St Paul during the State Fair and said that we needed a plague as there were too many people and not enough roads. I asked him what if the plague took him out, he said...oh well, whatever. Just thought about that today...thanks for the memories!

I suppose he wouldn't have to worry about traffic than lol

 

[TnWatchdog]

We won't be happy until we build a bomb big enough to take out whatever we want taken out or a influenza cocktail that does the same. Scientists will piss and moan until their mix mutates and becomes airborne, then they will be happy and we'll be dead.

Hybrid Flu, Created In Lab From Swine & Bird Influenza Genes, Can Go Airborne
| Posted: 05/06/2013 12:15 pm EDT

By Ed Yong
As the world is transfixed by a new H7N9 bird flu virus spreading through China, a study reminds us that a different avian influenza — H5N1 — still poses a pandemic threat.
A team of scientists in China has created hybrid viruses by mixing genes from H5N1 and the H1N1 strain behind the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and showed that some of the hybrids can spread through the air between guinea pigs. The results are published in Science1.
Flu hybrids can arise naturally when two viral strains infect the same cell and exchange genes. This process, known as reassortment, produced the strains responsible for at least three past flu pandemics, including the one in 2009.
There is no evidence that H5N1 and H1N1 have reassorted naturally yet, but they have many opportunities to do so. The viruses overlap both in their geographical range and in the species they infect, and although H5N1 tends mostly to swap genes in its own lineage, the pandemic H1N1 strain seems to be particularly prone to reassortment.
“If these mammalian-transmissible H5N1 viruses are generated in nature, a pandemic will be highly likely,” says Hualan Chen, a virologist at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the study.
“It's remarkable work and clearly shows how the continued circulation of H5N1 strains in Asia and Egypt continues to pose a very real threat for human and animal health,” says Jeremy Farrar, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Flu fears


Chen's results are likely to reignite the controversy that plagued the flu community last year, when two groups found that H5N1 could go airborne if it carried certain mutations in a gene that produced a protein called haemagglutinin (HA)2, 3. Following heated debate over biosecurity issues raised by the work, the flu community instigated a voluntary year-long moratorium on research that would produce further transmissible strains. Chen’s experiments were all finished before the hiatus came into effect, but more work of this nature can be expected now that the moratorium has been lifted.
“I do believe such research is critical to our understanding of influenza,” says Farrar. “But such work, anywhere in the world, needs to be tightly regulated and conducted in the most secure facilities, which are registered and certified to a common international standard.”
Virologists have created H5N1 reassortants before. One study found that H5N1 did not produce transmissible hybrids when it reassorts with a flu strain called H3N24. But in 2011, Stacey Schultz-Cherry, a virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, showed that pandemic H1N1 becomes more virulent if it carries the HA gene from H5N15.
Chen’s team mixed and matched seven gene segments from H5N1 and H1N1 in every possible combination, to create 127 reassortant viruses, all with H5N1’s HA gene. Some of these hybrids could spread through the air between guinea pigs in adjacent cages, as long as they carried either or both of two genes from H1N1 called PA and NS. Two further genes from H1N1, NA and M, promoted airborne transmission to a lesser extent, and another, the NP gene, did so in combination with PA.
“It’s a very extensive paper,” says Schultz-Cherry. “It really shows that it’s more than just the HA. The other proteins are just as important and can drive transmission.” Chen says that health organisations should monitor wild viruses for the gene combinations that her team identified in the latest study. “If those kinds of reassortants are found, we’d need to pay high attention.”
Knowledge gap


It is unclear how the results apply to humans. Guinea pigs have bird-like receptor proteins in their upper airways in addition to mammalian ones, so reassortant viruses might bind in them more easily than they would in humans.
And scientists do not know whether the hybrid viruses are as deadly as the parent H5N1. The hybrids did not kill any of the guinea pigs they spread to, but Chen says that these rodents are not good models for pathogenicity in humans.
There is also a chance that worldwide exposure that already occurred to the pandemic H1N1 strain might actually mitigate the risk of a future pandemic by providing people with some immunity against reassortants with H5N1. In an earlier study, Chen and her colleagues showed that a vaccine made from pandemic H1N1 provided some protection against H5N1 infections in mice6.
“If you take [antibodies] from people who have been vaccinated or naturally infected, will they cross-react with these viruses?” asks Schultz-Cherry. “That’s an important study that would need to be done.”
Ironically, Chen’s team is now too busy reacting to the emerging threat of a different bird flu — H7N9. Research on H5N1 will have to wait.

This story originally appeared in Nature News.

 

[BlastTyrant]

Maybe we do not need to worry so much about Nuclear war but Chemical war

 

[TnWatchdog]

Sooner or later an article will read...Out of control, a pandemic!

MERS Virus: Mysterious New Respiratory Virus Spreads Easily, Appears Deadlier Than SARS

By MARIA CHENG 06/19/13 05:23 PM ET EDT

LONDON -- A mysterious new respiratory virus that originated in the Middle East spreads easily between people and appears more deadly than SARS, doctors reported Wednesday after investigating the biggest outbreak in Saudi Arabia.
More than 60 cases of what is now called MERS, including 38 deaths, have been recorded by the World Health Organization in the past year, mostly in Saudi Arabia. So far, illnesses haven't spread as quickly as SARS did in 2003, ultimately triggering a global outbreak that killed about 800 people.
An international team of doctors who investigated nearly two dozen cases in eastern Saudi Arabia found the new coronavirus has some striking similarities to SARS. Unlike SARS, though, scientists remain baffled as to the source of MERS.
In a worrying finding, the team said MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) not only spreads easily between people, but within hospitals. That was also the case with SARS, a distant relative of the new virus.
"To me, this felt a lot like SARS did," said Dr. Trish Perl, a senior hospital epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Medicine, who was part of the team. Their report was published online Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Perl said they couldn't nail down how it was spread in every case – through droplets from sneezing or coughing, or a more indirect route. Some of the hospital patients weren't close to the infected person, but somehow picked up the virus.
"In the right circumstances, the spread could be explosive," said Perl, while emphasizing that the team only had a snapshot of one MERS cluster in Saudi Arabia.
Cases have continued to trickle in, and there appears to be an ongoing outbreak in Saudi Arabia. MERS cases have also been reported in Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Tunisia. Most have had a direct connection to the Middle East region.
In the Saudi cluster that was investigated, certain patients infected many more people than would be expected, Perl said. One patient who was receiving dialysis treatment spread MERS to seven others, including fellow dialysis patients at the same hospital. During SARS, such patients were known as "superspreaders" and effectively seeded outbreaks in numerous countries.
Perl and colleagues also concluded that symptoms of both diseases are similar, with an initial fever and cough that may last for a few days before pneumonia develops.
But MERS appears far more lethal. Compared to SARS' 8 percent death rate, the fatality rate for MERS in the Saudi outbreak was about 65 percent, though the experts could be missing mild cases that might skew the figures.
While SARS was traced to bats before jumping to humans via civet cats, the source of the MERS virus remains a mystery. It is most closely related to a bat virus though some experts suspect people may be getting sick from animals like camels or goats. Another hypothesis is that infected bats may be contaminating foods like dates, commonly harvested and eaten in Saudi Arabia.
Doctors around the world have struggled to treat patients. "We need more information from other countries to find out what the best treatment is," said Dr. Clemens Wendtner, who treated a MERS patient who later died in Munich. "Our patient got everything possible and it still didn't help him."
Other experts said there are enough worrying signs about MERS that it can't yet be written off, despite the relatively small number of cases it has caused.
"As long as it is around, it has every opportunity at the genetic roulette table to turn into something more dangerous," said Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.
WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan has previously called MERS the single biggest public health threat and acknowledged officials were "empty-handed" regarding prevention measures.
"We understand too little about this virus when viewed against the magnitude of its potential threat," she said last month in Geneva.
At a meeting this weekend in Cairo, WHO will meet with other experts to discuss MERS and to possibly develop guidelines for next month's Ramadan, when millions of Muslim pilgrims will be visiting Saudi Arabia.
___ Online:
CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/overview.html


Link... Mysterious New Virus Appears Deadlier Than SARS

 

[Wee]

You know why there are so many antibiotic resistant diseases? It isn't because antibiotics do not work, it is because of the exposure to more than one antibiotic for each individual. It is because so many people in this country have easy access to pharmaceuticals. It isn't anything for my son's pediatrician to prescribe him amoxicillin for bacterial infections (typically caused by seasonal allergies), versus treating the seasonal allergies. I can't even begin to recall how many times I've asked for a referral to an allergist, so I can treat the problem before antibiotics are needed.

It is the health care system, and it is the people's expectations in this country. People are fat, lazy, and rely on technology way to much. People become sick from not eating properly, exercising, and taking preventative measures. Most people only go to the doctor when they are sick (even those with health insurance), and for a large portion of the population, who could afford health insurance for preventative measures with such high premiums? (Thanks Obama Care).

I have health care insurance, I eat properly, I exercise, and I take care of my self. Do I have a primary care physician? No, I do not. Why? Because my insurance is expensive, and my deductible payments are more than $160 for a WELLNESS visit. Don't get me started on what a sick visit costs, especially for a child. I spent $200 dollars for a copay to the ER because I had pneumonia. And the antibiotic they gave me wasn't the one I needed. (Another 5o bucks)

The life expectancy of the population is far greater than it should be. People can live into their late 80's and 90's with absolutely no quality of life, depending on technology (Ventilators, trachs, and feeding tubes) to keep them alive, so they can lay in bed and rot for another 10 years because their family is too selfish to let them pass in peace. So while they rot and lay bedridden in a vegetative state and cannot recall their children's names or even their own, they eat up our taxes with government funded health programs (Medicare/Medicaid). They've been on every antibiotic known to man in order to lay in their vegetative state, hense the bacterial infections of MRSA, CDIFFICLE, and the worst of all, VRE (because if you're resistant to vancomycin, your fucked, unless you want to spend 10,000 on a bag of special IV xoxyn, which I'm almost 95% sure is not made anymore).

The flu get's a little more potent and resistant to the vaccine every year...so you want to know why the population will eventually lead to a crisis situation? Those who can afford to take preventative measures do not, those who cannot, will not, and people are too reliant on technology for living, literally. All the issues in the health care system and no one can see the big picture. Obama care will fix nothing until the population has affordable health care FOR preventative care measures.

OOOooo. I didn't expect to get on my political high horse tonight, but I did. In the end, the government needs to make health care affordable, ENHANCE preventative care measures, and in my own bias opinion, allow pro-active euthanasia to those who are terminal or with no life quality.

 

[TnWatchdog]

One of these days the scientists will say, "Dang, we really screwed up...we've made a virus that can't be stopped." They won't be happy until the develop a bigger meaner bomb or in this case virus. All we can do is sit back, wait, and see...a reassuring thought. The safest preventive measure is not to breath...lol

Check out story...Link Scientists Make Mutant Forms Of Bird Flu To Assess Risk

 

[TimeTravel_00]

Maybe there is truth in some of this "zombie" talk. What else did Obama plan on doing with 10+ billion rounds of ammunition???

 

[PaulaJedi]

Mystery stomach bug:
Health Warning: Mystery Stomach Bug Alert in 8 States | Video - ABC News

Latest Update:
Mystery Continues in Cyclospora Stomach Bug Outbreak - ABC News