Chikungunya - Bad News Close at Hand?

Why are you so freaked out by a non-lethal disease.?...it's spread by mosquitos, so just use some repellent....and there is a vaccine in the pipeline...stay out of the jungle...

"Why are you so freaked out by a non-lethal disease.?..."

First off I am not "freaked out" about anything; but after hearing about the impact it had on the health care system in FSM its not something to be ignored.

In terms of the human and economic toll a non lethal but debilitating disease is just as bad as a lethal disease.

Why caring about things we cannot change? There are zillions of living organisms harmful to the human being. The paradox is that the highest death rates are still due to preventable factors like road fatalities: in my country (Argentina) there are 12, 5 /100k inhabitants / year, in the US: 10 / 100k, while in the UK there are only 2,7 fatalities / 100 K inhab / year. This means something, probably more important than searching a vaccine for a improbable disease should be done now!

I was surprised to hear this from a health professional - "The paradox is that the highest death rates are still due to preventable factors like road fatalities" -

I had always believed that the greatest human toll was to insect vectored diseases such as malaria and water borne diseases that kill such a large number of children on this planet. Preventable - yes - but having much higher rates of morbidity and mortality than road fatalities.

Your reference to road fatality rates might be more meaningful if it factored total hours or miles driven, number of registered vehicles, etc.

I would like to add to my previous post that besides road accidents there still are tenths of millions of people (mainly children) who die from preventable diseases like Polio, chicken pox, etc for which vaccines have been available for decades. Diseases produced by malnutrition are also preventable just by feeding the people. So, before getting concerned about all the weird diseases we may catch in the future, it would be great to start providing safe food, water and vaccines to these people. This is also much cheaper than developing a vaccine against Chikungunya.

Doc:

Good points; I hope you are correct in assuming that Chikugunya is "improbable." Given its rate of increasing geographic distribution a better term might have been "inevitable."

It will be interesting to see where this leads in the next 2 to 5 years.

The Australians had been experimenting with a genetically modified mosquito vector that reduced the life span of the wild mosquito population where they could no longer sustain reproduction. The males were reared in the lab and then released into the wild to breed. The second generation of females didn't live long enough to reproduce. This would be a HUGE tool in the fight against many of the mosquito vectored diseases. I have not read anything on this for the past couple of years after suggesting that FSM might be a good field lab given its battle with Dengue at the time. Last year it was Chikungunya.

But as you said, and which I wholly agree, addressing malnutrition and clean water would probably have the greatest positive impact on human health.

Gavilan: good point you too !

Thanks for the bad news! I prefer to know what is out there. Many prefer to not to deal with a huge threat and pretend it doesn't exist.

I see that with malware. Yes, malware could also be as dangerous as an incurable virus. It is very possible a very large portion of the worlds computers are bot-net zombies. It is nearly impossible to keep them out without an industrial firewall. Any hostile country can afford to infect tens of millions of the world computers with bot nets. The malware is completely stealthy ( impossible to scan once installed). If they want to do us harm they can have these zombies attack the electrical grid, local and federal government communications links and put the target into chaos. How long would it take for a modern nation to go belly up without electricity. What if this was combined with a nuclear strike? Very unnerving...

The threats are well published only the extend or penetration is unknown because how can you quantify what you can't find? We like to believe that an unstoppable and completely stealthy malware would be rare. Why? I figure it would be rampant. Except for some programmers and a few servers the rest of the operation is free and self propagating. The infections are carried out by the captured zombies.

The economic consequences of cyber warfare would indeed be catastrophic. The economic and physical chaos unleashed could indeed be as deadly as a lethal pathogen; but only if the victims choose the path of chaos.

There is nothing wrong in spreading caution to public. Prevention is better than cure.

"The use of bioweapons requires protection for the actors."

Unless the Actors are the front-line 'suicide bombers,' while the Directors are safely out of the area, and the Technicians preparing the Actors have no communicable contact with the Directors.

Adreasler:

You are scaring the crap out of me. Why would there be a need of "suicide bombers?"

Surely the technicians could use unwitting vectors?

But the sxxt that goes around comes around?

That's thy I put the phrase 'suicide bombers' in quotes, they could be willing martyrs to 'the cause' (whichever cause that is) or they could be unwitting dupes carrying the disease in without knowing it.

There's a lot of loonies out there, many of which are willing to use the American 'rules of fair play' against us, giving pregnant women assault rifles, knowing that our reluctance to harm an innocent unborn child will give the woman more time to kill soldiers (I think this was in Cambodia) or loading up a disabled man's wheelchair with explosives, knowing that our tradition of caring for the injured will cause our border guards to lower their defenses and let the wheelchair-bound man get closer for increased casualties when he detonates his bomb. (This was a documented incident in Iraq). There are plenty of sick minds out there willing to sucker-punch us again and again, and if we try to defend ourselves from these tactics, we end up stooping to their level, and give up the 'high moral ground' that is the only thing that helps us as a nation to stay 'sane' in armed conflicts.

The world isn't a safe place. There are three types of people on this planet, the Sheep, the Wolves, and the Sheepdogs. The Wolves prey on the Sheep, and the Sheep fear the Wolves. The Sheepdogs fight against the Wolves to protect the Sheep. The Sheep are happy to see the Sheepdogs when the Wolves are attacking, because the Sheepdogs keep the Sheep safe, but when there are no Wolves visible, the Sheep hate the Sheepdogs because their presence reminds the Sheep that Wolves exist.

We've already been attacked in the US by some source of a Borrelia strain of bacteria that showed up basically world wide, in huge numbers, in only one year, 2008.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2600328/

as opposed to what is normal...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9872945/