New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | October 25, 2005

Kerry Howley knows her chicken. You've got to know your chicken.

Comments

|10.25.05 @ 11:59AM|#

Nice Cibo Matto reference.

Dave W.|10.25.05 @ 12:13PM|#

Avian influenza is the most malleable of news stories, a loose collection of "what if?" conjectures, apocalyptic scenarios, history lessons and science-based guesswork.

Maybe we should teach high school students that much of the work of "science" falls into this uncertain bin that Ms. Howley characterizes so well.

Jeff P.|10.25.05 @ 12:22PM|#

I've got Julian making links on the web, while Comedy Central runs a 1998 Dennis Miller special on the TV behind me. My brain can only take so many hipster references at once...

|10.25.05 @ 12:26PM|#

Dave W.,

Maybe we should teach them the difference between an orbiting telescope and the red shift too. :)

|10.25.05 @ 12:33PM|#

Has anyone entertained the possibility that when/if this virus mutates to a form that can go human to human, it won't be fatal?

|10.25.05 @ 12:36PM|#

C'mon Sage, where's the fun in that.

|10.25.05 @ 12:41PM|#

The 1918 flu likely evolved in the trenches of the First World War, but that fact doesn't explicity or implicitly argue against using the military to effect a quarantine during a massive outbreak of an infectious disease. (To get the full rundown on the evolution of the flu, see Paul Ewald's Evolution of Infectious Disease.) The conditions that allowed such a virulent and deadly disease to evolve were an outcome of the close contact between hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the trenches; a virus that can move from host to host with little difficulty can kill one host quickly and still find new hosts before the present one dies.

Whatever plan one does come up with to confront the outbreak of any terribly virulent disease--whether it's a potential avian flu epidemic, or the outbreak of a disease already adapted to move easily from person to person, such as Ebola--it is not clear that any would work. Perhaps the most effective would just be to hang a colored piece of paper from the doorknob of homes of infected people, signalling the healthy to stay away. The fact of the matter is, though, if the disease is most readily transmissible before symptoms appear, an epidemic will be extremely difficult to control by controlling the movements of the apparently healthy; home nursing and a lot of death likely will be the only way through, especially if the antiviral medications in existence don't affect the virus, which is quite possible.

As for Dave W.'s comment, and Ms. Howley's point he discusses, the doomsday scenarios make for good copy on one hand and serve a useful purpose in terms of making plans on the other. No one can predict how the disease will evolve, or what will happen if it becomes easily passed from person to person. However, to argue, as Dave W. seems to, that this somehow proves anything about science is absurd--the science of infectious disease epidemiology, the science of evolutionary biology and population biology, is quite sound. We may not know what will happen, but we certainly have a good idea of what can. Just because we don't know if a vaccine will be possible, or if antivirals will work, doesn't mean the science behind them is bad.

|10.25.05 @ 12:52PM|#

TJ,

The leading theory these days is that it originated in Kansas. Its more virulent version arose simultaneously in Boston, Brest and another locale I can't recall right now.

|10.25.05 @ 12:57PM|#

Hakluyt,

Really?

|10.25.05 @ 1:36PM|#

Maybe we should teach them the difference between an orbiting telescope and the red shift too.

PWNED.

|10.25.05 @ 2:08PM|#

PWNED?????

Sandy|10.25.05 @ 2:14PM|#

PWNED?????

Comment by: Please explain at October 25, 2005 02:08 PM

'leet (or l337, bastardization of "elite") speak for "owned" which used to apply to cracking a server to gain control or "owning" it. Now lots of lame little kiddies who aren't even script kiddies use it. They like to type to each other in this "cool" way, to say the equivalent of what my compadres used to call "eeba" or, more recently, "you got served".

See, now isn't that something you wish you'd just stayed ignorant about?

|10.25.05 @ 2:26PM|#

There's a wiki on PWN, which credits Quake, Warcraft, or some other game for the term. I'd never seen the term used before, but my gamer days, aside from a brief foray into Knights of the Old Republic, are behind me now.

|10.25.05 @ 3:19PM|#

I've seen powned used in Counter Strike, and I always assumed to to be a concatenation of "punked" (in the prison sense, I suppose) and "owned".

Dave W.|10.25.05 @ 4:13PM|#

PWNED.

I think knowing about things like bird flu (as unscientific or uncertain as a lot of the "science" is here) is way more important for the average US voter to know about than Doppler shifts. I know this makes me punk'd and nutz and all that, but its the way I feel.

|10.26.05 @ 12:52AM|#

avian flu is teh sux0rz.


(i'm sorry...i couldn't help myself.)

|10.26.05 @ 1:50AM|#

Speaking of Cibo Matto, Miho Hatori just released a CD in Japan, "Ecdysis." It's pretty weird, but cool.

|10.26.05 @ 10:28AM|#

Miho Hatori

I've met her before. She's incredibly cute in real life. I'm not surprised about what you say about her new album...I bet it's good.

|10.26.05 @ 7:06PM|#

So I'm listening to Mike Rosen on 850 KOA out of Denver the other day and he's interviewing a doctor (can't remember the name now) who's an expert in communicable diseases. They're yakking about avian flu and then Mike starts taking calls from listeners. This woman calls and thanks Mike heartily for bringing up this very important topic. Then she thanks the doctor for helping to educate people about this very important topic. Then she says she has a very important message for the children out there (because so many kids are listening to republican talk-radio during school hours). She asks the doctor if he knows of any program that would help her to spread her very important message in the classroom, because it could save thousands and thousands of lives. Young lives. The lives of our children. The message is: Kids, don't touch dead birds.

I love hysterical mothers.