4150331/catastrophe The Dozen Most Significant - Html#abstract

Humans have survived every disease theyve ever faced, and none have come close
to wiping out the species because they kill the host too quickly to spread
Posner, 5 Richard Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, judge on the United
States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, January 1, 2005, Skeptic, Catastrophe: the dozen most
significant catastrophic risks and what we can do about them, http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_01994150331/Catastrophe-the-dozen-most-significant.html#abstract
Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the 200,000 years or
so of its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is on extinction events. There have been
enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but none has come
close to destroying the entire human race. There is a biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of
limited lethality; they are fitter in an evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if
the germs do not kill their hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying
dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy the entire
human race. The likelihood of a natural pandemic that would cause the extinction of the human race is
probably even less today than in the past (except in prehistoric times, when people lived in small, scattered bands, which would
have limited the spread of disease), despite wider human contacts that make it more difficult to localize an infectious disease. The reason is
improvements in medical science. But the comfort is a small one. Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention
and cure: the lesson of the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a lust time.
Intervening actors prevent spread

Wills 96 (Christopher, Professor of Biology at the University of California Yellow Fever, Black
Goddess)
I am confident that no terrible disease will appear that slaughters us by the billion. The reason is that we
can now respond very quickly to such a visible enemy. Any disease that spreads like wildfire will have to
go so through the air or water and there are many steps we can take right away to prevent such a spread. If
the people of fourteenth-century Europe had known what we know now, they could have halted the black death in short order.
More ev on intervening actors recent events prove theres no chance of a pandemic

Zakaria 9Editor of Newsweek, BA from Yale, PhD in pol sci, Harvard. He serves on the board of
Yale University, The Council on Foreign Relations, The Trilateral Commission, and Shakespeare and
Company. Named "one of the 21 most important people of the 21st Century" (Fareed, The Capitalist
Manifesto: Greed Is Good, 13 June 2009, http://www.newsweek.com/id/201935)
NoteLaurie Garrett=science and health writer, winner of the Pulitzer, Polk, and Peabody Prize
It certainly looks like another example of crying wolf. After
bracing ourselves for a global pandemic, we've

suffered something more like the usual seasonal influenza . Three weeks ago the World Health Organization
declared a health emergency, warning countries to "prepare for a pandemic" and said that the only question was the extent of
worldwide damage. Senior
officials prophesied that millions could be infected by the disease. But as

of last week, the WHO had confirmed only 4,800 cases of swine flu, with 61 people having died of it.
Obviously, these low numbers are a pleasant surprise, but it does make one wonder, what did we get wrong? Why did the
predictions of a pandemic turn out to be so exaggerated? Some people blame an overheated media, but it
would have been difficult to ignore major international health organizations and governments when they were warning of
catastrophe. I think there
is a broader mistake in the way we look at the world. Once we see a problem, we can
can rarely anticipate the human
response to that crisis. Take swine flu. The virus had crucial characteristicsthat led researchers
to worry that it could spread far and fast. They describedand the media reportedwhat would happen if it went
describe it in great detail, extrapolating all its possible consequences. But we
unchecked. But
it did not go unchecked. In fact, swine flu was met by an extremely vigorous
response at its epicenter, Mexico. The Mexican government reacted quickly and massively,
quarantining the infected population, testing others, providing medication to those who needed
it. The noted expert on this subject, Laurie Garrett, says, "We should all stand up and scream, 'Gracias, Mexico!'
because the Mexican people and the Mexican government have sacrificed on a level that I'm not sure as Americans we would be
prepared to do in the exact same circumstances. They shut down their schools. They shut down businesses, restaurants, churches,
sporting events. They
basically paralyzed their own economy. They've suffered billions of dollars in

financial losses still being tallied up, and thereby really brought transmission to a halt." Every
time one of these viruses is detected, writers and officials bring up the Spanish influenza
epidemic of 1918 in which millions of people died. Indeed, during the last pandemic scare, in 2005, President George W.
Bush claimed that he had been reading a history of the Spanish flu to help him understand how to respond. But the world we
live in today looks nothing like 1918. Public health-care systems are far better and more widespread
than anything that existed during the First World War. Even
Mexico, a developing country, has a first-rate

public-health systemfar better than anything Britain or France had in the early 20th century.
We control try or die even a 99% risk of the advantage isnt existential
Simon, 95 Julian Simon, Cato Institute Scholar, 95 [University of Maryland Business Administration
Professor,The State of Humanity, 652]
What about the possibility of a catastrophic disease that could devastate humanity? Many thoughtful
people worry that increased human mobility might raise the chance of global disease transmission.
Before considering this possibility, we should note that even a disease of greater magnitude than has
ever occurred would only reverse contemporary human progress for a relatively short time. The
demographic and economic losses from the worst disaster in history - the Black Death, which killed
perhaps a quarter of the population of major European countries - had been recovered after only a
century or so; the population size and the standard of living soon were back almost to where they
would have been otherwise. Furthermore, even a disaster of unprecedented scale- say, a devastation of
90 percent or even 99 percent of humanity - would not have permanent effects . The only essential
element for a modern economy and society is the knowledge that resides in libraries. With the books
housed there, a small number of people could create what they would need in a matter of decades.
Advanced medicine solves it can even proactively prevent disease development

before halting spread
Economist, 10 11/22/10 (http://www.economist.com/node/17493456)
Fortunately, globalisation
will also speed the flow of health data. In 2011 the growing field of digital epidemiology
will attract more students, health officials and resources than ever before. People in viral hotspots around the world will
report suspicious human and animal deaths (often a warning sign of a coming plague) by mobile phones. These data will be
posted to the web, instantly enriching the data that came from traditional surveillance systems and electronic medical records. Organisations
like Google.org will scour search patterns around the world, expanding their search-based predictions of influenza to
other infectious diseases. Still more creative early-detection systems will begin to pull together illness
information present in social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, allowing us to see changing disease patterns before they
make the morning news. Novel laboratory approaches to the discovery of new viruses will emerge . The long-awaited era
of single-molecule DNA sequencing will begin in earnest with new machines from companies like Pacific Biosciences, and
with a bit of luck this will improve the speed at which we can recognise unknown bugs. At the cutting edge, new
studies of virus evolution and chips housing tiny cell cultures will improve our capacity to sort through the viral chatter and determine if a newly
identified outbreak has the potential to spread globally or is likely to fade away. The
discovery of new viruses will make the

move from universities to laboratories around the world, helping to facilitate international scientific
collaboration and decrease fears of biopiracy. Towards a global immune system In 2011 you may be among those who will watch
Contagion, a forthcoming movie about a frightening fictional pandemic. But whether you are a head of state wary of the political and economic
costs of a disease catastrophe, a CEO concerned by supply-chain and staff disruption associated with the next pandemic or a citizen worried about
your family, in
2011 you will have access to better, more accurate and rapidly available data on actual
outbreaks. In the increasingly popular Silicon Valley model, organisations like ours will mash up multiple data sourcescombining lab
results in far-flung viral listening-posts with international news feeds, text messages, social-networking and search patterns to create a new form
of epidemic intelligence. The
past ten years have seen noteworthy progress in the development of truly global
systems. In the world of outbreaks, 2011 will mark the beginning of the development of a worldwide immune
system that will detect and respond to biological threats before they go global. Although this will take years to
build fully, if successful it could make pandemic anniversaries a thing of the past.
Their theory of existential risk is implausible misunderstands how pathogens

operate
AMNH 98 The American Museum of Natural History How did Hyperdisease cause extinctions?
http://www.amnh.org/science/biodiversity/extinction/Day1/disease/Bit2.html)
It is well known that lethal diseases can have a profound effect on species' population size and structure.
However, it is generally accepted that the principal populational effects of disease are acute--that is, shortterm. In other words, although a species many suffer substantial loss from the effects of a given highly
infectious disease at a given time , the facts indicate that natural populations tend to bounce back after the period
of high losses. Thus, disease as a primary cause of extinction seems implausible. However, this is the normal
case, where the disease-provoking pathogen and its host have had a long relationship. Ordinarily, it is not in the pathogens interest
to rapidly kill off large numbers of individuals in its host species, because that might imperil its own
survival. Disease theorists long ago expressed the idea that pathogens tend to evolve toward a "benign"
state of affairs with their hosts, which means in practice that they continue to infect, but tend not to kill
(or at least not rapidly). A very good reason for suspecting this to be an accurate view of pathogen-host relationships is that individuals
with few or no genetic defenses against a particular pathogen will be maintained within the host population, thus ensuring the pathogen's ultimate
survival.

4150331/catastrophe The Dozen Most Significant - Html#abstract

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

4150331/catastrophe The Dozen Most Significant - Html#abstract

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

4150331/catastrophe The Dozen Most Significant - Html#abstract

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Humans have survived every disease theyve ever faced, and none have come close

Intervening actors prevent spread

More ev on intervening actors recent events prove theres no chance of a pandemic

bracing ourselves for a global pandemic, we've

officials prophesied that millions could be infected by the disease. But as

basically paralyzed their own economy. They've suffered billions of dollars in

Mexico, a developing country, has a first-rate

Advanced medicine solves it can even proactively prevent disease development

discovery of new viruses will make the

Their theory of existential risk is implausible misunderstands how pathogens

You might also like

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.