5 ms·

I feel you are engaging in a bit of the "hubris" I mentioned before. The problem with your initial "what if?" is that viruses and their hosts are not simple pro

I feel you are engaging in a bit of the "hubris" I mentioned before. The problem with your initial "what if?" is that viruses and their hosts are not simple programmable systems. > There's nothing that says a virus that kills quickly and efficiently can't also spread well. There is, though. The fitness of a virus is reflected in its ability to reproduce and spread. The ability of a virus to kill is not a positive for fitness, and over the long run is in fact a negative evolutionary influence. After all, if you leave your host alive, you then have the chance to mutate just enough to avoid detection by the immune system and re-infect the same host (hello seasonal flu!). If you killed the host the first time...whoops! This won't kill 3 billion. If it kills in excess of 100 million I would be completely shocked. I suspect the world would go full "madagascar" ("shut...down...everything!") if deaths reached more than 10 million. And that's the real problem, isn't it? H5N1 is deadly, sure. But, much as the human immune system overreacting to an infection is the most common cause of death by H5N1, humanity's overreaction to a pandemic will likely be far more damaging than the pandemic itself.

true_religion 15y ago
> There is, though. The fitness of a virus is reflected in its ability to reproduce and spread. Yes, in naturally occurring viii who's development is controlled by natural selection. However there is no absolute genetic impediment to having a virus that is both easily spread (contagious with a medium length incubation time), and deadly (kills host immediately after incubation). Human beings could engineer that virus in the same way we engineered mice that glow in the dark.
- jballanc 15y ago
  Believing that laboratory-made organisms somehow obey different laws than nature-made organisms is exactly the sort of hubris I was alluding to. There absolutely is a genetic impediment to a virus that is both easily spread and deadly. Biological organisms are highly complex, non-linear, stochastic systems. You can resist malaria, but you'll get sickle cell disease. You might suffer from high prevalence of Cystic Fibrosis, but your population can better resist cholera. Biological variables are, essentially, never independent. This is why systems biology is such a difficult area to study. Oh, and those mice that glow in the dark might look cool in the lab, but they'd be the first to get eaten in the wild. There's a reason mice don't naturally glow in the dark...
  - fhars 15y ago
    Of course they don't obey differntet laws and a virus that does both spread fast and kills most of the infected will die out. Because it extinguishes enough of its host population so it can no longer spread. That is sort of the point in this discussion. If it affects just a small village or half a country or more depends on the incubation period.
  - learc83 15y ago
    I'd say it's exactly like antibiotic resistant bacteria, in the presence of antibiotics they can outcompete the normal strains. However, in the wild given no antibiotics the non-antibiotic strains will outcompete them.
- Retric 15y ago
  You can build a virus that does X, but when you send it into the wild it will vary quickly go though 10,000+ generations of natural selection outside the laboratory. It's easy to forget that every new infection start's with a tiny percentage of the host's infection which then needs to replicate a lot before that host can infect someone else. More importantly, you can limit your infection from anything by simply limiting contact. The old "shut down everything" which can contain even a highly infectious virus that's hit a huge chunk of the population aka 5+%. This might not prevent infection but it slows down the spread enough that evolutionary pressure is going to start to push up incubation periods etc.
feral 15y ago
>The ability of a virus to kill is not a positive for fitness, and over the long run is in fact a negative evolutionary influence. I think the Keynes quote is, for once, appropriate here: "In the long run, we are all dead." Your argument seems to be that as a virus with a longer incubation is fitter, that if someone released the virus in the article, it would quickly mutate into this 'fitter', less lethal version. I think you misunderstand the evolutionary process. I suspect that if the virus was released, because it is already so contagious, it could infect most of us within 10s of human-to-human transmission generations (especially if any of the early spreaders had a large number of contacts, or was well connected). In that scenario, there's not going to be sufficient generations for the evolutionary adaptation to manifest. (10s of human-to-human generations is vastly more virus copying generations; this doesn't matter, as the evolutionary effect in favor of less lethality occurs at a human level). So, your argument would make sense to me, if we were considering the chances of a virus like this one naturally occurring; but that's not what the article is about. >I suspect the world would go full "madagascar" ("shut...down...everything!") if deaths reached more than 10 million. Epidemics tend to either burn out, or grow exponentially. Exponential growth has strange consequences. For something like an airborne and highly contagious flu, by the time 10 million people have died, it is way too late for any containment; at that stage maybe 1B are already infected. Even by the time even 10,000 people have died, I would guess its too late for containment. We live in a very 'small world' these days, and that really changes this sort of discussion.
- jballanc 15y ago
  > I think you misunderstand the evolutionary process. I suspect that if the virus was released, because it is already so contagious, it could infect most of us within 10s of human-to-human transmission generations (especially if any of the early spreaders had a large number of contacts, or was well connected). On the contrary, I think you are misunderstanding the evolutionary process. Why do you think it was possible to evolve this new transmissibility in only 10 or so passages in ferrets? Influenza mutates and adapts with breathtaking rapidity (another thing which makes it very interesting to study, and hard to combat). Also, selection can happen within a single individual. As soon as an infection gets inside of a cell, variety begins arising. The immune system then begins its battle, and it becomes a numbers game. The varieties which reproduce more rapidly will also be targeted first. If a different variety inside the same host can fly under the radar by reproducing at a more measured pace, it will gradually win out within that host.
adrianwaj 15y ago
"immune system overreacting" What do you think of homeopathy? It's supposed to work best for infectious diseases at controlling symptoms: cutting back an overreaction. The argument homeopaths make is that bacteria would otherwise populate within an overreacted tissue, leading to further overreaction (the body creates its own symptoms: dis-ease) and they also say the body is full of bacteria/pathogens anyhow yet homeostasis can still be found.
- prodigal_erik 15y ago
  There's no reason to think homeopathy works. Testing has been very poorly done, there's no measurable mechanism of action, and they can't even explain how a body could distinguish the intended active ingredient from the thousands of contaminants which were surely present in similar concentrations—that stuff isn't prepared in cleanrooms, and distilled water is far from pure. http://lesmondine.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/homeopathy-theres-something-in-it/ http://lesmondine.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/homeopathy-theres... http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/11/measuring_contaminants_and_concluding_th.php http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/11/measuring_contamin... http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/homeo.html http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/homeo.html
  - adrianwaj 15y ago
    Well, the body does overreact to things: look at the Spanish Flu. If a policeman told you that your family were all killed in aeroplane crash, you'd react in a certain way, even though it wasn't true and they injected no chemicals into you. To me, homeopathy is a way of hacking the body. Anyway, I've mentioned homeopathy once before on HN and was also downvoted, so probably not a great place to bring it up. Add: if a doctor said you only had 5 months to live, you'd probably start doing all these things you'd never got around to doing, or thought you could do, the bucket list - then in 5 months when you're still around, you realize it may have been a lie, but your depression has lifted and you have a new lease on life: that's what I think homeopathy is supposed to be: tiny signals on certain levers, accepted as true, leading to massive effects.
    - 15y ago

true_religion 15y ago

> There is, though. The fitness of a virus is reflected in its ability to reproduce and spread. Yes, in naturally occurring viii who's development is controlled by natural selection. However there is no absolute genetic impediment to having a virus that is both easily spread (contagious with a medium length incubation time), and deadly (kills host immediately after incubation). Human beings could engineer that virus in the same way we engineered mice that glow in the dark.

jballanc 15y ago
Believing that laboratory-made organisms somehow obey different laws than nature-made organisms is exactly the sort of hubris I was alluding to. There absolutely is a genetic impediment to a virus that is both easily spread and deadly. Biological organisms are highly complex, non-linear, stochastic systems. You can resist malaria, but you'll get sickle cell disease. You might suffer from high prevalence of Cystic Fibrosis, but your population can better resist cholera. Biological variables are, essentially, never independent. This is why systems biology is such a difficult area to study. Oh, and those mice that glow in the dark might look cool in the lab, but they'd be the first to get eaten in the wild. There's a reason mice don't naturally glow in the dark...
- fhars 15y ago
  Of course they don't obey differntet laws and a virus that does both spread fast and kills most of the infected will die out. Because it extinguishes enough of its host population so it can no longer spread. That is sort of the point in this discussion. If it affects just a small village or half a country or more depends on the incubation period.
- learc83 15y ago
  I'd say it's exactly like antibiotic resistant bacteria, in the presence of antibiotics they can outcompete the normal strains. However, in the wild given no antibiotics the non-antibiotic strains will outcompete them.
Retric 15y ago
You can build a virus that does X, but when you send it into the wild it will vary quickly go though 10,000+ generations of natural selection outside the laboratory. It's easy to forget that every new infection start's with a tiny percentage of the host's infection which then needs to replicate a lot before that host can infect someone else. More importantly, you can limit your infection from anything by simply limiting contact. The old "shut down everything" which can contain even a highly infectious virus that's hit a huge chunk of the population aka 5+%. This might not prevent infection but it slows down the spread enough that evolutionary pressure is going to start to push up incubation periods etc.

feral 15y ago

>The ability of a virus to kill is not a positive for fitness, and over the long run is in fact a negative evolutionary influence. I think the Keynes quote is, for once, appropriate here: "In the long run, we are all dead." Your argument seems to be that as a virus with a longer incubation is fitter, that if someone released the virus in the article, it would quickly mutate into this 'fitter', less lethal version. I think you misunderstand the evolutionary process. I suspect that if the virus was released, because it is already so contagious, it could infect most of us within 10s of human-to-human transmission generations (especially if any of the early spreaders had a large number of contacts, or was well connected). In that scenario, there's not going to be sufficient generations for the evolutionary adaptation to manifest. (10s of human-to-human generations is vastly more virus copying generations; this doesn't matter, as the evolutionary effect in favor of less lethality occurs at a human level). So, your argument would make sense to me, if we were considering the chances of a virus like this one naturally occurring; but that's not what the article is about. >I suspect the world would go full "madagascar" ("shut...down...everything!") if deaths reached more than 10 million. Epidemics tend to either burn out, or grow exponentially. Exponential growth has strange consequences. For something like an airborne and highly contagious flu, by the time 10 million people have died, it is way too late for any containment; at that stage maybe 1B are already infected. Even by the time even 10,000 people have died, I would guess its too late for containment. We live in a very 'small world' these days, and that really changes this sort of discussion.

jballanc 15y ago
> I think you misunderstand the evolutionary process. I suspect that if the virus was released, because it is already so contagious, it could infect most of us within 10s of human-to-human transmission generations (especially if any of the early spreaders had a large number of contacts, or was well connected). On the contrary, I think you are misunderstanding the evolutionary process. Why do you think it was possible to evolve this new transmissibility in only 10 or so passages in ferrets? Influenza mutates and adapts with breathtaking rapidity (another thing which makes it very interesting to study, and hard to combat). Also, selection can happen within a single individual. As soon as an infection gets inside of a cell, variety begins arising. The immune system then begins its battle, and it becomes a numbers game. The varieties which reproduce more rapidly will also be targeted first. If a different variety inside the same host can fly under the radar by reproducing at a more measured pace, it will gradually win out within that host.

adrianwaj 15y ago

"immune system overreacting" What do you think of homeopathy? It's supposed to work best for infectious diseases at controlling symptoms: cutting back an overreaction. The argument homeopaths make is that bacteria would otherwise populate within an overreacted tissue, leading to further overreaction (the body creates its own symptoms: dis-ease) and they also say the body is full of bacteria/pathogens anyhow yet homeostasis can still be found.

prodigal_erik 15y ago
There's no reason to think homeopathy works. Testing has been very poorly done, there's no measurable mechanism of action, and they can't even explain how a body could distinguish the intended active ingredient from the thousands of contaminants which were surely present in similar concentrations—that stuff isn't prepared in cleanrooms, and distilled water is far from pure. http://lesmondine.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/homeopathy-theres-something-in-it/ http://lesmondine.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/homeopathy-theres... http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/11/measuring_contaminants_and_concluding_th.php http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/11/measuring_contamin... http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/homeo.html http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/homeo.html
- adrianwaj 15y ago
  Well, the body does overreact to things: look at the Spanish Flu. If a policeman told you that your family were all killed in aeroplane crash, you'd react in a certain way, even though it wasn't true and they injected no chemicals into you. To me, homeopathy is a way of hacking the body. Anyway, I've mentioned homeopathy once before on HN and was also downvoted, so probably not a great place to bring it up. Add: if a doctor said you only had 5 months to live, you'd probably start doing all these things you'd never got around to doing, or thought you could do, the bucket list - then in 5 months when you're still around, you realize it may have been a lie, but your depression has lifted and you have a new lease on life: that's what I think homeopathy is supposed to be: tiny signals on certain levers, accepted as true, leading to massive effects.
  - 15y ago