Dr. Casey’s Swine Flu Tips for Humanz

I don’t how people feel about promoting dkos diaries here, but there was a great one on the current condition and probable future of the swine flu.  It’s as complete as any I’ve seen.  Compared to some stuff on the rec list . . . well, never mind.  If you want to be up-to-date on what is known, what is not known, and what is likely, you will not find a better diary.

The main thing is simple.  Be aware of what you do with your hands in public–railings, door handles, shopping carts.  When you contact these things, keep your hands away from your face until you wash them.  If you’re in an area with the flu, you can carry alcohol wipes for killing the virus on your hands.

Despite the near-hysteria and obsessiveness people say is on the big ole tv screens, I hope people realize that this is not bs in the way of WMD in Iraq.  The CDC is one government agency that still has a fairly decent idea of what they are doing.  Even if this fizzles into a normal flu episode, that will not mean that they got it wrong.

Here’s a description of the highly unlikely worst case scenario:

dr. fauci’s worst-case, and it is truly frightening, would be an h5n1 virus (which inherently have high lethality) “reassorting” with a virus like this one, that can easily spread between humans, and a third virus, creating a unique triple reassortment.

a unique version of such a virus could be highly lethal and easily spread, so if, just for the sake of argument, 5% of 200,000,000 exposed were to die, that’s 4 million with a lethality roughly twice that of the 1918 flu, 2 million if you adopt the same death rate of 1918.

In an extremely unlikely and extremely high-risk situation such as this, our intuitive sense of how to balance risk/reward doesn’t operate very well.  It makes sense to put resources and attention into this, even though the most likely outcome is a typical flu season.