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The 2006 Budget includes a cut in NIH (National Institutes of Health) of 2.1%, which in inflation adjusted terms will probably be closer to 5%. This leaves it at $28 billion. Another story in the last two weeks looked at human infections of bird flu in Asia last year. If I recall the numbers correctly, there were 44 cases and 35 fatalities - 80%.
That's exceeds bubonic plague, and is more in line with smallpox for unexposed populations, i.e. initial exposures in North America. The only disease I know of that's worse is Ebola (and AIDS, but that is an entirely different dynamic/transmission vector). Even if it's cut in half, that still would put it at a 40% fatality rate, well in line with the Black Plague (the fatality rate is why I say this solves the Social Security problem, though that assumes it will target older populations more heavily - which might not be a safe assumption with Avian flu as in the 1918 pandemic).
The disease is out there, it's highly contagious (among birds, and it will be in humans once it jumps), and the world is just going on with business as usual. Unless we get lucky and it takes over a decade to break out of Asia, and we have some new biotech advances in the interim, this will be a catastrophe. No crash programs to develop a rapid flu vaccine development/deployment cycle, no preparation of public health measures to shut down movement in the case of an outbreak aka the old quarantine sytems, etc. Are any countries out there doing anything to prepare and maybe ameliorate an outbreak?
That's exceeds bubonic plague, and is more in line with smallpox for unexposed populations, i.e. initial exposures in North America. The only disease I know of that's worse is Ebola (and AIDS, but that is an entirely different dynamic/transmission vector). Even if it's cut in half, that still would put it at a 40% fatality rate, well in line with the Black Plague (the fatality rate is why I say this solves the Social Security problem, though that assumes it will target older populations more heavily - which might not be a safe assumption with Avian flu as in the 1918 pandemic).
The disease is out there, it's highly contagious (among birds, and it will be in humans once it jumps), and the world is just going on with business as usual. Unless we get lucky and it takes over a decade to break out of Asia, and we have some new biotech advances in the interim, this will be a catastrophe. No crash programs to develop a rapid flu vaccine development/deployment cycle, no preparation of public health measures to shut down movement in the case of an outbreak aka the old quarantine sytems, etc. Are any countries out there doing anything to prepare and maybe ameliorate an outbreak?
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