Gavin's Blog

The vastness even of our own solar system is astonishing, that it would take just a year to get to Jupiter, and then another eight to get to Pluto gives you some sense of scale. Because of the orbits of the planets, this mission really has to go ahead before February 14th, or else the probe won’t arrive until 2020, rather then 2015. I will be about 34 when I read news of the probes arrival. Interesting side note…

It will be the fastest spacecraft ever launched, zooming past the moon in nine hours and reaching Jupiter in just over a year at a speed nearly 100 times that of a jetliner.

It still amazes me that humans can do this kind of thing, not only send things into space, but land them on objects like asteroids.

Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London has a piece on avian flu in today’s IHT. She notes:

The influenza virus that caused the infamous Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 had only eight genes – but it brought about more than 20 million human deaths. And alas, its lethality cannot be blithely attributed to wartime deprivation. For one thing, it was particularly deadly in young, healthy adults. For another, in a remarkable feat of genetic engineering, a team of biologists recently reconstructed the 1918 virus and used it to infect mice. The results are sobering. The 1918 virus is far, far more lethal in mice than are other human flu viruses.

H5N1 also has eight genes (by way of comparison, humans have about 20,000). So far, the virus’ effects have been more modest than those of the 1918 influenza: It has killed a lot of birds and about 60 people. That’s still worrying, however, because it has killed more than half of the people it has infected. For a virus, that is a high death toll.

My emphasis. There appears to be a conception out there that the very young and very old will be worse affected by an eventual flu pandemic, this is not necessarily the case.

She ends with a warning:

But the most important point is this: Viruses and other pathogens evolve in ways that we can understand and, to some extent, predict. Whether it’s preventing a flu pandemic or tackling malaria, we can use our knowledge of evolutionary processes in powerful and practical ways, potentially saving the lives of tens of millions of people. So let’s not strip evolution from the textbooks, or banish it from the class, or replace it with ideologies born of wishful thinking. If we do, we might find ourselves facing the consequences of natural selection.

Did anyone see Horizon last week? The study into epigenetics was fascinating, the theory that there may be much more to inheritance than mere DNA was thought provoking – can anyone recommend reading in this area?

More news on the avian flu front. It appears that the cases in Turkey have been confirmed as H5N1, meanwhile

The EU has banned all bird and poultry products from Romania after tests confirmed the presence of a strain of bird flu there. Duck samples tested positive for the H5 virus, contradicting earlier findings. But there is no evidence yet that the strain is the serious H5N1 variety, which has killed 60 people in Asia. Further tests will be carried out.

Another development on the avian flu front. I have not heard of any flu outbreaks in Turkey so I imagine this is a precautionary measure. The BBC notes:

The decision came after Turkish authorities slaughtered up to 2,000 birds in the north-west of the country in an effort to control the disease.

As many as 1,500 turkeys are said to have died on a farm in the region.

It has not yet been confirmed if it’s HN51.

It gets ever closer, and what has Ireland done to prepare? I’d hazard pretty much nothing.

Romanian officials quarantined a Danube delta village of about 30 people Friday after three dead ducks there tested positive for bird flu — the first such cases reported in the region.

Agriculture Minister Gheorghe Flutur said the virus found in the farm-raised ducks came from migrating birds from Russia.

And while it is difficult for the virus to spread from birds to humans, authorities were taking no chances. They sealed off the village of Ciamurlia and banned hunting and fishing in eight counties in the region.

Romania also suspended imports of chickens and other poultry from 15 countries, most of them in Asia.

How long do we have before a mututation occurs?

Yet another space tourist makes it to the ISS. He paid an estimated $20 million for the pleasure. I would hope that in my lifetime the price of a trip into orbit, not suborbit, will come down into the 5-figure bracket. It seems a little more likly with Space Ship Two on the way, and private investment into space technology increasing.

Dan Drezner links to some recent articles relating to avian flu, including the recent news that some strains of avian flu could be resistant to the antiviral drug Tamiflu. The figure of 7.4 million deaths globally as a result of a flu pandemic seem frightfully small to me. I have recently heard that Ireland has done practically nothing, and I am still awaiting word from the HSE. Time to start asking again.

Finally someone is quoting some figures (more reasonable to me anyway) that the inevitable flu pandemic could bring. Foreign Affairs had a special edition a while back on the avian flu threat, and back then I guesstimated a figure of 500 million was more likely than the figure of 20 million being suggested by most news sites. 150 milion would be 50 more than the 1918 pandemic, but I guess the outcome would be entirely dependent on how quickly the world’s governments cooperate and pull together to deal with it.

Why does this not surprise me. I suppose I should be grateful they are doing something.

The Department of Health is expected to tell the Government’s Working Group on Emergency Planning tomorrow that it will be next year before it has the one million packs of anti-viral drugs which international trends suggest would be best practice for preparing to deal with the emergence of any flu pandemic.

Separately, Department of Health officials are expected to warn that planning for a global flu pandemic, while aiming to reduce the rates of death and illness, can only mitigate the effects of the outbreak and that the consequences were still likely to be serious.

The Department of Health is expected to tell the working group that in the event of a pandemic, anti-viral drugs could be used to prevent influenza in the early stages, alleviate symptoms or shorten the duration of the condition, but that the production of a vaccine tailored to a specific strain could take six to nine months.

The department is also expected to tell the working group that it is also set to procure around 200,000 doses of the H5N1 vaccine against the avian influenza strain implicated in the recent outbreak in Asia.

The working group, chaired by Minister for Defence Willie O’Dea, is to deal with official preparations for a major international flu pandemic at its meeting tomorrow.

Willie O’Dea? Is that not like putting Michael Brown in charge of FEMA, or worse?

Well hopefully I will see this in my lifetime, to think we have left it so long before going back is strange. But I think there are reasons other than scientific here, space will become a very important place in the next few decades, and controlling it will be pretty important, the US appears to even want to control the strategically important LaGrange points (PDF).

Go and add your name to a list being put on a CD and being sent to Pluto, it will arrive there in 2015.