Showing posts with label Influenza. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Influenza. Show all posts
Sunday, February 6, 2022
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Wet Markets. SARS, MERS, COVID 19, Pandemics. This will surely draw rebuke, and
perhaps it should, which doesn't mean it's not without a point.
A couple of days ago, Hua Chunying, a Chinese spokesman, posted a frustrated post in regard to stories accusing the Chinese of delaying supplying information regarding COVID 19 to the world.
I don't know how quickly China altered other nations, but the country is insular by nature. Did the warning come soon enough? I don't know that it would have mattered if it came any sooner. It might have, or it might not have. The key, really, was Chinese lunar new year, which spread the disease all around China, and around the globe. Chinese lunar new year this year was January 25.
Anyhow, there's some good evidence that the US was aware of early warnings on the disease and somewhat disregarded them, in spite of intelligence warnings. Be that as it may, it's interesting to note that the first thing that the US did in response to the epidemic, as it was at that time, was to ban travel from China.
Which resulted in the Administration getting criticism that it was being typically draconian and overreacting. We now know that was precisely the right thing to do, but it didn't go far enough. Maybe nothing would have worked, but at the same time, given the realities of global travel, the Administration really should have banned incoming travel from anywhere, which would have seen, up until about three weeks ago, draconian in the extreme.
Anyhow, Hua Chunying's frustrated Twitter received a reply from Liz Cheney. The exchange is below.
Actually, it's pretty unlikely that the coronavirus jumped from bats to human beings through a bowl of bat soup.
But it does appear to have jumped from bats to people in a wet market, and something really does need to be done about that. A wet market is a market in which live animals are sold for consumption.
Now, I'm not going to go all full bore fanatic on this the way some, as in if it isn't done in my culture it shouldn't be done. But wet markets are a real anachronism that really ought to go in general. Crowing ducks, chickens, pigs etc. etc., live in a densely populated city is just asking for trouble, and trouble we now have. We've known this forever.
Indeed, wet markets once existed all over the world, but in the western world they've mostly ceased. Mexico, I believe, still has wet markets, but it's an exception in the northern hemisphere of the Americas, and they ought to stop it as well. Its not that I think people shouldn't eat ducks, chickens, pigs, etc., but packing them in like this is a really bad idea. And mixing them in with wild animals that have had no close care (assuming that in Asia domestic animals do, which is another topic entirely), is a really bad idea. Eating wild animals is fine, if they're in the range of animals that people eat (which some of the things in Chinese markets are not), but they should be procured directly in the wild.
Put another way, would you want deer from Wyoming, which are exhibiting a terrible Chronic Wasting Disease outbreak, shoved into a pen, live, next to a pig, and sold downtown in your city?
I didn't think so.
And maybe some in Asia is actually now being done, although its not enough. China banned the sale of wild animals at wet markets on January 1, 2020, fourteen days prior to the event noticed above, but clearly after they knew that they had a real problem. Wet markets in general ought to entirely go, but that's a step in the right direction.
There's an interesting cultural angle at work here that absolutely prohibits Western nations from criticizing anything about non western ones, while at the same time westerners are free to demand that other westerners stop their own long held practices. Indeed, this exchange provoked the expected replies. An example is here:
No, it's not racist at all.
The Chinese and other Asian "wet" markets are ideal breeding grounds for the communication and jump of viruses from animals to humans. They simply are. There's a reason that nearly every new version of the flu comes out of Asia, and it isn't because the flu vacations there. The flu is a real killer, and Asian conditions are the ideal breeding ground for it. The Chinese themselves may have finally taken the first step to stopping this, although it doesn't go far enough.
And in recent years, it hasn't just been the flu. The prequel to COVID 19 was SARS and SARS 2, which is another coronavirus. It's still around, but it seems to have been brought under control. It seems, also, to have pretty much the same type of origin as COVID 19, with bats as its donor, but with civet cats in the transmission chain.
The third big one in recent years is MERS. It doesn't have an Asian origin, but rather a Middle Eastern one.
From the World Health Organization.
Okay, why does this matter? Well let's consider a comment from the Lancet regarding MERS:
Stopping the disease will be best achieved by prevention at the source. Like John Snow, who removed the handle of the water pump on Broad Street following the cholera outbreak in London, public health officials need to find the key lever at the sources of disease through a greater understanding of the enzootic patterns.
The long and the short of it is that things like this likely broke out in these locations repeatedly in the past. Humans in those regions were lucky in that none of them were as deadly as the Great Plague, which broke out in Europe due to the vile conditions in Medieval cities. But of note there, the Plague doesn't break out anymore as people don't let the conditions that cause it arise.
The Chinese were doing little, or at least not enough about the situation which has given rise to this, until the outbreak occurred. They knew exactly where to go, and that it was the "wet market".
A wet market slaughters meat right on the spot. No USDA veterinarians inspecting the facilities in that instance. And the Chinese retain a fondness for exotic foods that are often eaten due to folklore. Bats caught wherever bats are caught and brought right into the market with Bat Funk.
Indeed, common sense would lead you to the conclusion bats aren't food. Eating a bat basically violates the cardinal rule of omnivores and predators that they don't eat each other. It's not safe. Wolves don't eat coyotes, lions don't eat hyenas. You get the picture. People eating bats is, frankly, flat out weird and ought to stop.
But this is only part of the strange Chinese table demand, which retains a lot of folk items that are consumed on demonstratively false assumptions about them, including species that shouldn't be eaten at all as they're a danger to humans.
And as noted, we'd have a fit if there was a downtown market with deer hauled freshly off the range this morning shoved into a pen next to pigs and chickens. And we indeed should, that wouldn't be safe.
Thousands will now die all over the globe due to this. And if we include SARS and SARS 2, this is the third time in recent years, excluding all the version of the flu that come out of Asia, that this has occurred. With the rapid speed of modern transportation, every local epidemic will now become a pandemic.
Now, the largest wet markets in the world are closed as to the sale of wild animals, but they aren't closed. Closing them would be swimming massively against the cultural tide, but it is something that has disappeared in the West. Indeed, if it was suggested we reopen them here, there'd be howls of protests from the same classes that protest that noting the Chinese situation is somehow inappropriate. And indeed, telling others what they can and cannot eat, and can and cannot do is something that we should always think twice about. But here's an example of where something really needs to change.
A couple of days ago, Hua Chunying, a Chinese spokesman, posted a frustrated post in regard to stories accusing the Chinese of delaying supplying information regarding COVID 19 to the world.
I don't know how quickly China altered other nations, but the country is insular by nature. Did the warning come soon enough? I don't know that it would have mattered if it came any sooner. It might have, or it might not have. The key, really, was Chinese lunar new year, which spread the disease all around China, and around the globe. Chinese lunar new year this year was January 25.
Anyhow, there's some good evidence that the US was aware of early warnings on the disease and somewhat disregarded them, in spite of intelligence warnings. Be that as it may, it's interesting to note that the first thing that the US did in response to the epidemic, as it was at that time, was to ban travel from China.
Which resulted in the Administration getting criticism that it was being typically draconian and overreacting. We now know that was precisely the right thing to do, but it didn't go far enough. Maybe nothing would have worked, but at the same time, given the realities of global travel, the Administration really should have banned incoming travel from anywhere, which would have seen, up until about three weeks ago, draconian in the extreme.
Anyhow, Hua Chunying's frustrated Twitter received a reply from Liz Cheney. The exchange is below.
But it does appear to have jumped from bats to people in a wet market, and something really does need to be done about that. A wet market is a market in which live animals are sold for consumption.
Now, I'm not going to go all full bore fanatic on this the way some, as in if it isn't done in my culture it shouldn't be done. But wet markets are a real anachronism that really ought to go in general. Crowing ducks, chickens, pigs etc. etc., live in a densely populated city is just asking for trouble, and trouble we now have. We've known this forever.
Indeed, wet markets once existed all over the world, but in the western world they've mostly ceased. Mexico, I believe, still has wet markets, but it's an exception in the northern hemisphere of the Americas, and they ought to stop it as well. Its not that I think people shouldn't eat ducks, chickens, pigs, etc., but packing them in like this is a really bad idea. And mixing them in with wild animals that have had no close care (assuming that in Asia domestic animals do, which is another topic entirely), is a really bad idea. Eating wild animals is fine, if they're in the range of animals that people eat (which some of the things in Chinese markets are not), but they should be procured directly in the wild.
Put another way, would you want deer from Wyoming, which are exhibiting a terrible Chronic Wasting Disease outbreak, shoved into a pen, live, next to a pig, and sold downtown in your city?
I didn't think so.
And maybe some in Asia is actually now being done, although its not enough. China banned the sale of wild animals at wet markets on January 1, 2020, fourteen days prior to the event noticed above, but clearly after they knew that they had a real problem. Wet markets in general ought to entirely go, but that's a step in the right direction.
There's an interesting cultural angle at work here that absolutely prohibits Western nations from criticizing anything about non western ones, while at the same time westerners are free to demand that other westerners stop their own long held practices. Indeed, this exchange provoked the expected replies. An example is here:
Replying to
@Liz_Cheney
That’s impressively racist, even graded on the GOP bigotry curve.
No, it's not racist at all.
The Chinese and other Asian "wet" markets are ideal breeding grounds for the communication and jump of viruses from animals to humans. They simply are. There's a reason that nearly every new version of the flu comes out of Asia, and it isn't because the flu vacations there. The flu is a real killer, and Asian conditions are the ideal breeding ground for it. The Chinese themselves may have finally taken the first step to stopping this, although it doesn't go far enough.
And in recent years, it hasn't just been the flu. The prequel to COVID 19 was SARS and SARS 2, which is another coronavirus. It's still around, but it seems to have been brought under control. It seems, also, to have pretty much the same type of origin as COVID 19, with bats as its donor, but with civet cats in the transmission chain.
The third big one in recent years is MERS. It doesn't have an Asian origin, but rather a Middle Eastern one.
Source of the virus
From the World Health Organization.
Okay, why does this matter? Well let's consider a comment from the Lancet regarding MERS:
Stopping the disease will be best achieved by prevention at the source. Like John Snow, who removed the handle of the water pump on Broad Street following the cholera outbreak in London, public health officials need to find the key lever at the sources of disease through a greater understanding of the enzootic patterns.
The long and the short of it is that things like this likely broke out in these locations repeatedly in the past. Humans in those regions were lucky in that none of them were as deadly as the Great Plague, which broke out in Europe due to the vile conditions in Medieval cities. But of note there, the Plague doesn't break out anymore as people don't let the conditions that cause it arise.
The Chinese were doing little, or at least not enough about the situation which has given rise to this, until the outbreak occurred. They knew exactly where to go, and that it was the "wet market".
A wet market slaughters meat right on the spot. No USDA veterinarians inspecting the facilities in that instance. And the Chinese retain a fondness for exotic foods that are often eaten due to folklore. Bats caught wherever bats are caught and brought right into the market with Bat Funk.
Indeed, common sense would lead you to the conclusion bats aren't food. Eating a bat basically violates the cardinal rule of omnivores and predators that they don't eat each other. It's not safe. Wolves don't eat coyotes, lions don't eat hyenas. You get the picture. People eating bats is, frankly, flat out weird and ought to stop.
But this is only part of the strange Chinese table demand, which retains a lot of folk items that are consumed on demonstratively false assumptions about them, including species that shouldn't be eaten at all as they're a danger to humans.
And as noted, we'd have a fit if there was a downtown market with deer hauled freshly off the range this morning shoved into a pen next to pigs and chickens. And we indeed should, that wouldn't be safe.
Thousands will now die all over the globe due to this. And if we include SARS and SARS 2, this is the third time in recent years, excluding all the version of the flu that come out of Asia, that this has occurred. With the rapid speed of modern transportation, every local epidemic will now become a pandemic.
Now, the largest wet markets in the world are closed as to the sale of wild animals, but they aren't closed. Closing them would be swimming massively against the cultural tide, but it is something that has disappeared in the West. Indeed, if it was suggested we reopen them here, there'd be howls of protests from the same classes that protest that noting the Chinese situation is somehow inappropriate. And indeed, telling others what they can and cannot eat, and can and cannot do is something that we should always think twice about. But here's an example of where something really needs to change.
Saturday, March 7, 2020
Oh great. I've now seen the first television doctor comparing COVID 19 with the Spanish Flu. . .
and claiming it's just as bad.
Well, at least there's not a giant global world war adding to things.
Well, at least there's not a giant global world war adding to things.
Saturday, February 29, 2020
Pandemic
A plague doctor wearing the special costume of such doctors at the time. The costume was thought to protect the wearer against the plague. If it seems weirdly creepy, it's probably just about as effective as wearing a surgical mask in a public place.
Pandemic:
A pandemic is the worldwide spread of a new disease.World Health Organization.
An epidemic of disease, or other health condition, that occurs over a widespread area (multiple countries or continents) and usually affects a sizeable part of the population.U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Pandemic refers to an epidemic that has spread over several countries or continents, usually affecting a large number of people.U.S. Center for Disease Control.
Pandemic: An epidemic (a sudden outbreak) that becomes very widespread and affects a whole region, a continent, or the world due to a susceptible population. By definition, a true pandemic causes a high degree of mortality (death)
By contrast:
- An epidemic affects more than the expected number of cases of disease occurring in a community or region during a given period of time. A sudden severe outbreak within a region or a group as, for example, AIDS in Africa or AIDS in intravenous drug users.
- An endemic is present in a community at all times but in low frequency. An endemic is continuous as in the case of malaria in some areas of the world or as with illicit drugs in some neighborhoods.
The word "pandemic" comes from the Greek "pan-", "all" + "demos," "people or population" = "pandemos" = "all the people." A pandemic affects all (nearly all) of the people. By contrast, "epi-" means "upon." An epidemic is visited upon the people. And "en-" means "in." An endemic is in the people.Web MD*
Is there a Coronavirus epidemic and if there is, will it become a pandemic?
It's certainly creating havoc on the world economic scale, but a lot of that is due to human reaction rather than the disease itself. Faced with a new disease that seemed to have a high incidence of fatality, the People's Republic of China struggled to get ahead of the disease and for a time, frankly, did badly, resorting to shutting information up, the usual reaction of a Communist state to any bad news of any kind whatsoever. After that, exhibiting massive control of the population, it managed to shut things down.
That had an impact on the world's economy as it was. China has become the manufacturing hub, unfortunately, for the globe, relying on cheap labor and a well educated population as it does. So the virtual closing of a region of the giant country had an immediate ripple effect on the economy of the planet. But only a ripple.
Which is temporarily beside the point in this post.
Humans retain an interesting memory, sort of, of historic pandemics. In our collective memories, they occur, but our memory of them is quite flawed. Almost by definition we imagine all pandemics to be real killers, and we have been worrying that Coronavirus will break out as a killer pandemic.
Here on this site we're somewhat uniquely situated as we deal with, the past two years, the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic, which was a real killer that swept the globe to massive effect. Millions died in that event, which had a 2.5% mortality rate.
Yes, 2.5%.
That doesn't sound that high, but a normal variant of the flu has a less than .1% mortality rate. The flu still kills thousands in the U.S. every year, but it didn't have the impact that the 1918-19 flu did.
The pandemic, however, that really remains vaguely in our memory was the Great Plague, which killed 30% to 60% of the European population and which is estimated to have reduced the human population by about 500,000,000 people globally. Raging from 1347 to 1351, the pandemic actually trailed all the way into the 20th Century, contrary to popular understanding of it, and is actually within the vague life experience of quite a few living people. Regions of the globe in some instances didn't recover until the 19th Century.
Of course, we need to keep in mind a couple of things about both of these. First of all, living conditions contributed a lot to the Great Plague. It's flea borne disease, after all. Today, the plague, which is still around, isn't nearly as deadly as we don't live in a sea of fleas.
In the 1340s, we did.
When you hear of somebody getting the plague and dying of it today, and you do if you pay careful attention, it's because they did something that put them in contact with fleas. Hunters will occasionally get them from game, and I recall reading in a National Geographic about a rural hiker getting it just because of where he walked his dog.
In contrast, the most recent disease to clearly achieve the widespread dread level, AIDS, may or may not have ever been a pandemic, but because of its mode of transmission was actually fairly difficult to get. The plague put the entire 14th Century human population at risk because of the way they lived and had to live. AIDS actually only put a narrow demographic at risks due to a variety of things, all of which except for blood borne transfusions, had an element of human conduct involved to them. I'm not cast aspersions of any kind here, but only noting the science of it.
The 1918 Flu, however, was an airborne disease that people simply couldn't avoid. The conditions of World War One, including crowded troop conditions, massively contributed to its spread, as did the transportation of troops around the globe. But the disease itself was airborne.
So is the Coronavirus, and like the 1918 flu, it got started in crowed conditions (and in Asian conditions, like most flus do) and its being transported around the globe due to travel, the difference being that its getting around a lot quicker than the 1918 flu did.
The mortality rate of the Coronavirus isn't known yet. Early reports in China placed it at 17%, which is massive. If that was the rate, the globe would really be in for it as this would truthfully be an airborne disease the likes of which we haven't seen for a very long time. More recent data, however, roughly came in at about 3%, and then 2%. In comparison the the death rates for SARS is 9.6%, MERS 34% and the Swine Flu, which was a bad one, .02%
The disease is distinctly different than the flu in a lot of ways, which is important to note. The flu takes a trip through ducks and pigs on its way to humans, for one thing, while the Coronavirus takes a trip through bats. That's bad as bats have a titanic immune system and that means that the virus doesn't terminate there for that reason.
Additionally, the flu is a family of nasty diseases where as this Coronavirus is just one, COVID-19.
Like the flu, however, people's reactions vary and apparently 81% of those who get Coronavirus get a mild form of it. Some show hardly any reaction to it at all. That's good as chances are if you get it, it'll be mild. It's hardest on the elderly, which is the case for the normal flu (but which was not the case for the 1918-19 flu which hit the young hardest). And it may turn out to be that it's less deadly than it currently appears to be. Frankly the fact that it was an unknown disease when it hit and that only the severely ill were reporting to hospitals made it initially appear worse than it was.
Having said that, even if its half as deadly as it currently appears, it'll still kill a lot of people who get infected.
And frankly, from a scientific prospective, my guess is you are going to get it.
A recent Harvard report put the floor of the infection at 40% of the human population, and the ceiling at 60%, which is less than the 1918 flu ultimately infected. I'd guess that to be right, no matter what.
And that does mean that this is going to impact the economy. It'll do it only temporarily. Taking the 1918-1919 flu as the most analogous example is difficult, however, as World War War was raging during its worst months, which made its economic impact muted; people kept fighting and kept making munitions, etc., as they had to. Having said that, the flu did basically take the Australian Army in Europe out of the war in the fall of 1918, which was towards the war's end, and it may have had an impact on the German 1918 spring offensive. Had the war not been raging, the economic impact would have been notable, but then if the war hadn't been raging, the flu likely wouldn't have turned into a pandemic. So it turns out that it's not a very good analogy. Indeed, one Federal researcher who studied it concluded:**
The influenza of 1918 was short-lived and “had a permanent influence not on the collectivities but on the atoms of human society – individuals.”31 Society as a whole recovered from the 1918 influenza quickly, but individuals who were affected by the influenza had their lives changed forever. Given our highly mobile and connected society, any future influenza pandemic is likely to be more severe in its reach, and perhaps in its virulence, than the 1918 influenza despite improvements in health care over the past 90 years. Perhaps lessons learned from the past can help mitigate the severity of any future pandemicAnd so, this isn't a cheery post. My guess is that this disease, now that the evidence is in, will get around, and it will kill quite a few. It won't be like the Great Plague, thank goodness, but it'll be a disaster for some, and it will be a damper on the global economy until the spring.
*FWIW, the best of these definitions is the Web MD one.
**Economic Effects of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic Implications for a Modern-day Pandemic Thomas A. Garrett Assistant Vice President and Economist Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
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