Bad Flu season

[Marlin Perkins]

The vaccine is an educated guess, it is better than not taking the shot.

 

[Mod 11]

Jnutz, I don't see why I'd have to bust my nuts figuring out things people don't bother explaining. That's not my job.

Snoodle understood my reply since he explained where his remark came from. He somehow also understood I wasn't going to rip his head off since I visibly suspected he was either joking or referring to some sarcastic opinion.

On top of this, my reply to Snoodle's post doesn't concern you so, you know what you can do...

That part of the discussion is closed.

 

[Mod 11]

Gents, this thread is not about the earth's overpopulation. Please open a new thread if you want to discuss that.

Back to topic now: Bad flu season.

 

[Merlot]

Gents, this thread is not about the earth's overpopulation. Please open a new thread if you want to discuss that.

Back to topic now: Bad flu season.

M11,

It's about the flu. If you were referring to me, which it seems, my former post was about transmission, not overpopulation. Transmission is the key, and population is one critical factor.

You may be aware that the great Flu pandemic of 1918-1920 was greatly enhanced by troops returning home, troops who had been so close and concentrated for so long that the flu was able to transmit and mutate more easily. So population density can be a big key to transmission. I had also said population alone was not always critical, that medical knowledge, skill, and various infrastructures were very important.

I was on subject, if not as confined as your view of...the flu. Why be so strict?

This flu virus has actually been engineered by the government.

The "vaccine" contains chemicals that will give you cancer several years later.

All this is a conspiracy to reduce the earths population

:smile: have a nice day lol

PFFFFSSSSST! So people pay to hear Bill Gates give speeches the are the equivalent of the "Final Solution". Then you present a totally unfounded conspiracy by Mike Adams who writes everything right in line with every Right Wing conspiracy nut theory. NUTZ.

Um, Bill Gates wasn't saying in his TED talk that vaccines reduce world population by killing people. He was saying vaccines reduce world population because women in 3rd world countries have a whole bunch of children because the expectation is that many will die of childhood of diseases that are easily prevented by vaccine.

Correct. The irony is that populations under greater survival stress reproduce faster, hence the reproduction rate in the U.S. has dropped per family since the effective use of vaccines from about 2.4-2.5 to 1.7-1.8. Of course there are other reasons too.

History teaches that when certain areas of the Earth became overpopulated, opportunistic diseases and famine served to weed out excess population. It is fact. The Bubonic Plague killed one third of the population of Europe in the 14th century; Europe was hit harder than other parts of the world due to the concentration of population and the ease with which the disease was spread by rodents largely dependent on a concentrated human population.

What is overpopulation? The inability of resources and socio-economic infrastructures to support the population. It's not just larger numbers.

It's can be a huge contributing factor, but not the determining one. Barbara Tuchman's book, "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century", points this out. There was a social system in which the serfs were little more than fodder. Medical Science wasn't even a term and what skill existed was often blocked by religious bigotry and persecution. Sanitary conditions and hygiene were abysmal, practically perfect for an infestation, and few had resistance to the plague. Once the aristocracy lost so many of their source of wealth, the serfs, they turned to brigand armies further preying on their own population for booty with devastating raids of pillage and slaughter, leaving little peace to cultivate crops in many areas. Then there was the Hundred Years War and the battles of soldiers on either side of the Great Schism further magnifying the disastrous loss of life.

The total loss of life due successive waves of disease, war, and infrastructure collapse is estimated at over 50% in the 14th century. That's still less than in the Americas where populations were much more sparse and the first wave of diseases the natives had no immunity to like chicken pox, whooping coughs, fevers, mumps, flu often took 50-60%, and sometimes 80-90%.

All in all disease transmission depends on more factors than population, though population density can obviously make the situation much worse. Today, one of the greatest factors would be human mobility and the opportunity of a disease to move as quickly as people...just as the flu between 1918-1920.

bonne journée monsieur M11,

Merlot

 

[EagerBeaver]

Mod 11,

Overpopulation has always been a factor in epidemics in the past as mentioned previously. Overpopulation enhances the possibilities for transmission of a unique strain of any virus or bacteria resistant to human immune systems, and is certainly a valid topic for debate in the context of this thread.