|
jlf1961 -> RE: Are we on borrowed time? (12/28/2012 8:48:07 PM)
|
The only natural disaster that would effect everyone on the planet is an extinction causing asteroid or comet impact. Then everyone is screwed.
FEMA recommends that every household keep 72 hours of emergency supplies on hand in case of a natural disaster.
The term Doomsday has a lot of meanings, the average prepper is looking at not a natural disaster, but either and economic or man made disaster.
I am more concerned about a world wide pandemic. Plague mutations that are resistant to antibiotics have been found in wild animals, viruses routinely mutate and jump species, this is how we get the flu.
quote:
If it’s a particularly contagious virus, it would spread across the planet in a year. “If it starts in New York, it’s going to be in London certainly within a week,” says Ira Longini, a biostatistician at the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle who uses computer models to analyze how viruses globe-trot. “And from there, it will quickly travel to the rest of North America and Europe.” For Longini’s computer forecasts to become reality, though, certain conditions would need to be met.
First, it should be a strain of influenza. As anyone who has suffered through a bout of flu knows, it affects the respiratory tract, so sneezing and coughing make it easy to infect anyone within a three-foot radius. The virus must originate in a major city with plenty of airport traffic, to ensure that it jumps continents. Arising during the winter would speed its spread too, because the “normal” colds or flus people typically catch at that time of year could throw health officials off the trail of the real megabug, says Andrew Pekosz, a virologist and immunologist at Johns Hopkins University. The idea seems to freak him out. “With everybody expressing similar symptoms, we’d end up chasing, chasing, chasing, but always being a few steps behind, never really able to interrupt the spread.”
A virus with a mortality rate of 30% would place a strain on city services trying to deal with the dead. Should a virus like Ebola ever mutate to jump from monkeys to humans, you are looking at a mortality rate of 50 to 90%.
And the simple truth is that new viruses are discovered all the time.
|
|
|
|
