ZED & Payback is a BITCH when you don’t believe in “Evolution”

I’d like to know what evidence Orent has that the strain being caught by people in the US is different from, or milder than, the Mexico strain. It seems like she’s just speculating herself, especially since the Mexico flu was apparently never that lethal either:

“The swine flu outbreak in Mexico may be smaller than initially feared after the country’s health minister yesterday revised down the suspected death toll from 176 to 101.

There have been 908 tests on suspected cases in Mexico. Of them, 397 turned out to have the virus, health officials said.

The Mexican health minister, José Ángel Córdova, said the results were broadly in line with the mortality rate of seasonal flu.“

That’s from The Guardian this morning.

Influenza might be an excellent example of evolution and natural selection in action but the analogy is too subtle to persuade evolution deniers. It is surprising that they even (appear to) accept the concept of viruses which they cannot see, instead of attributing the outbreak to God’s wrath or witchcraft.

Thanks for the Great Post PeterR, I’d be digging ya post but…. Although someone on The Late Late nite said
DIGG has changed their policy on capturing all the traffic that should have gone to the writer’s website!?? But we can wait for Jane’s green light on this..

LOL ha ha ha right on the head ratfood.

Some of these Texas whackos don’t believe the moon reflects the sun, so you’re definitely on to something there, ratfood.

Hmm. I suppose I missed my chance to sell Anti-Flu Crucifixes, Guaranteed to Ward off the Swine Flu Evil Eye Foul Witchcraft.

Oh well.

nothing to do w/evolution deniers, but along the line of talking heads not knowing what they are talking about…

a couple days ago, either on cnn or msnbc, i saw an achoress say out loud, “there was a swine flu outbreak in the 70’s. i didn’t know that, did you, bob?” and bob replied “no, i didn’t!”

you’d think they’d at least google the subject matter before getting on camera.

I’m certain it’s not too late although for legal reasons you might want to substitute a disclaimer for the guarantee. Won’t hurt sales since they won’t read the fine print.

““The swine flu outbreak in Mexico may be smaller than initially feared after the country’s health minister yesterday revised down the suspected death toll from 176 to 101.There have been 908 tests on suspected cases in Mexico. Of them, 397 turned out to have the virus, health officials said. The Mexican health minister, José Ángel Córdova, said the results were broadly in line with the mortality rate of seasonal flu.“

Hmm! 397 established cases of swine flu and a revised down mortality of 101. That would be a 25% mortality rate (or 20% if one is not considering the deaths as part of the “established cases”). That’s an extremely high mortality rate…so either they have a horrific PH System in Mexico during normal seasonal flu cycles or Minister Cordova is full of caca.

Please explain to me how a 20-25% rate of mortality is not “that lethal”?

Really, when in the US 25 to 35 thousand die but that is out of a a hundred million cases or so every year. It is nature’s way of culling the “Herd”.

change “guaranteed” to “helps” and you’re in the clear.

Good day, all-

Swine flu, come on. You can say it. Corporate pork producers want everyone to say H1N1 to obscure the source, but it’s euphemistic language to protect corporate interests. And along the same lines, what Biden said the other day about cramped transportation tubes was spot-on, but the airline industry had a freakout over it because truth (and good public health policies) risks their profits.

We won’t teach you science, but we can and will torture you! I don’t think there is anything in the bible that says you have to educate people appropriately, but I know you are not suppose to LIE.

Christianity at it’s finest.

I’ve noticed that a lot of non-scientific creationist leaning people are able to accept that bacteria ‘evolve’ to develop drug resistance and might, might be able to take it a step farther in order to understand more complex epidemiological phenomena that follow the same genetic/biologic rules. But what they can’t hold in their minds side by side is how the process by which bacteria develop drug resistance and a completely new species of life is created follow the exact same process at the fundamental deterministic level of genetic change.

I think lay people accept that bacteria develop drug resistence, they just don’t understand how it happens. It takes an understanding of what DNA is, how it determines both form and function, and how changes in DNA sequence are both conserved and changed. Once you truly understand that, everything else falls in place.

The ideal way to proceed educationally is to focus on teaching kids about DNA and how it works, not to mount a battle of elimination for explaining the origin of life. Kids are smart, and given a basic scientific framework they will spontaneously ask the fundamental questions with their newfound knowledge.

Evolution deniers have twisted up words and what evolutionary theory actually says about the time scale. They will say…”well the virus is STILL a virus…it hasn’t evolved into a cat. When you can show me virus becoming a monkey, I’ll believe that man evolved from a monkey.”

They will argue that the virus isn’t evolving, and that Natural Selection isn’t occurring…”the virus is simply adapting”. Of course, genetic adaptation is explained by Darwinian selection- to them it is something that merely “happens” (probably by the hand of God…or Satan).

There is the fundamental problem with creationist thinking though. It’s the idea that you must restrict you explanations to the specific case you have investigated. Thus any other research of flu viruses is irrelevant to this case. They are applicable only to the case studied. This prevents our knowledge of Natural Selection, or genetic drift, or other factors from being applied as explanations to phenomenon generally. Finding a single case of evolutionary sequences doesn’y mean that you have “proved evolution”…except ‘perhaps’ in that one line (and it is defined as a “kind”…so it’s merely microevolution).

Of course, this promotes a more general anti-Scientific (and anti-rationalist) worldview…where hypothesis testing cannot lead to General Theories (which are themselves subject to test). In fact, a test – outside the precise framework of the phenomenon that one wants to question- becomes irrelevant, as well. In a sense, all explanations become equal…it’s just a matter of opinion and propagandising which becomes the dominant “worldview” on how things occur in the Universe. It’s post-modernism gone fundamentalist.

Thanks Peterr.

Have the christianistas come up with a reason why Texas is the worst hit state? Have they had a gay parade lately?

darwin loves you.

Speaking of DNA I just read an article that it takes a very small portion of the so called “Junk” parts of our DNA to make us different from the apes. Gee if over 99% of Our DNA is the same as ours maybe we are related!! Ya think?? These creationist cannot even begin to wrap their feeble minds around that one. Check out this article from Scientific American: Chimpanzees are the closest living relatives of humans and share nearly 99 percent of our DNA
Sure reinforces MY belief in Evolution.

well, we don’t have any confirmed cases in Iowa yet, and you’d think we’d be #1 on the “Wrath of God” hit parade. Take that Texas.

Hey Mary how goes it on the river??

Are people in Kansas safe from the virus since, in Kansas, evolution is merely a theory? Which brings up the question, which intelligence designed this new virus?

Seasonal influenza is a very serious problem in the United States and elsewhere. It’s actually one of the biggest infectious disease issues in the US (although some non-infectious diseases certainly have higher death rates). One reason it’s not dealt with more seriously is that it often is fatal in individuals who already have some other illness that compromises their immune system…the elderly, people in hospitals with other issues, those with respiratory illness, HIV-infected individuals, etc.

But the mortality rate of seasonal influenza is nowhere near what it was in the 1918 Swine Flu epidemic. And the rates in Mexico are not like that of seasonal flu…at least not in the US. And I doubt that Seasonal Flu mortality rates in Mexico are even close to 20-25%.

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your point. I don’t believe that this disease is “natures’ way of culling the herd”. That gives “nature” a motivation…a mind…a purpose for bringing on a disease. That would be no more reasonable than Jimmy Swaggart claiming that the disease came on because we sinned…and God was angry at us. In my view nature simply “is”…it’s amoral. Sure, we should be very careful of factory farming (and infectious disease is why the farmers pump these critters up with antibiotics in their feed, which increases the probability that any bacterium that does make it through the herd will be super-resistant). But we also make such “farms” more likely when we have large population sizes, etc.

Plus, there’s a remarkable resemblance between George W. Bush and chimps.

Yes, nature just is.

John Anderson is upstairs with more on Pecora
The Pecora Committee in Context: Mythbusting

No was just using that statement as a metaphor, but there is a correlation to Culling as populations getting overly dense, you see a rise in disease and thus there is a natural Culling/reduction of the herd. An no not some preplanned actions by Mother Nature!

Some are blaming the undocumented immigration “problem”. But I doubt that Perry is going to close the border with Mexico to standard traffic, which is a much more likely source.

Furthermore, I wonder what the situation is with access to health services is in Texas. In this sort of situation you are better off making access to those services available to everyone, regardless of immigration status, economic level, age or ethnicity. More funds should be pumped into monitoring, without retribution, in every community (including barrios) and the schools. It’s just the opposite of what the “Minutemen” and their allies have been advocating.

Not one pig has been discovered with the source virus in Mexico or the US. In addition, you don’t get swine flu from eating pork. It’s people who are dealing with the live pigs that may obtain the disease. And the disease that was initially passed may not have been as lethal as the one that eventually ended up in Mexico. Most likely the disease was first transferred in China (or elsewhere in Asia) to someone on a vessel or aircraft and was passed through a cycle, ending up in Mexico before it became recognized as a serious problem. Viruses evolve at each transfer, some of the strains being “beaten down” by the individuals immune system or drugs they may be taking. Others within the same “colony” may be able to survive and may actually be more, or even less, virulent. There are lots of dormant flu viruses floating out there in the human population, some embedded in our genome, as innocuous, long-term hitch-hikers. In fact, it’s been pointed out that the human genome is more bacterial, and viral, in origin…than “vertebrate” functional genes.

Unlike Egypt, where they are foolishly slaughtering millions of pigs, we don’t need to feed such hysteria, Mr. Puppethead.

That DNA “junk” may not be junk. It may be significant.

I agree, the name change was to save pigs.

I always though Bush looked more like a macaque in his facial expressions.

I always wondered why they initially called the H1B1 virus involved in the 1918 Pandemic the “Spanish Flu”. Had to be some sort of public relations effort there to obscure the real source, I suspect.

I thought I was strong enough to resist jumping in here to speculate on the relative IQ’s of ANYONE in texas but I have been swayed back to my roots by facts…

The base-line for this article seems to presume that FACTS actually matter to anyone in the south – especially texas…. The church (any organized version – you pick) or the Klan disputes ALL facts that aren’t in line with their current thread of beliefs. It matters not that ‘outsiders’ keep producing proof that the opposite of what has been told to them from on high at a gathering is truth because all else from ‘outside influence’ be damned…

This how cults are started and continue to thrive…just keep your wits about you…

I agree with this too, don’t believe it’s junk, just “not yet known” functions.

As the above linked article points very well.

For decades, molecular biology research focused almost exclusively on genes that specify proteins, the basic building blocks of cells. But thanks to the Human Genome Project, which sequenced our own genome, scientists now know that protein-coding genes make up just 1.5 percent of our DNA. The other 98.5 percent—sometimes referred to as junk DNA—contains regulatory sequences that tell other genes when to turn on and off and genes encoding RNA that does not get translated into a protein, as well as a lot of DNA having purposes scientists are only beginning to understand.

Orent presents an interesting idea but I don’t think it tracks particularly well with the 1918 outbreak which began in this country was transmitted to Europe and from there around the world. If the troops were the source of the lethal strain borne of their proximity to each other then you might expect them to be the first and hardest hit. But they weren’t particularly and so this invites other explanations. Certainly, the mass movements that were taking place helped disseminate the virus.

Crowding certainly helps transmission. But this is not just true of lethal fast acting diseases. A slow acting difficult to transmit disease like TB is helped by prolonged close contact.

Even if a disease is highly lethal the real question is can the disease be shed effectively and seed itself before the host is dead or effectively isolated. Now what it looks like is that the disease did seed itself but while lethal was not highly lethal. It may simply be that in the Russian roulette of viral evolution we dodged a bullet.

Ah…found the answer. Spain likely got their flu from France…which obtained it from Belgium. But because Spain was not bound by wartime censorship, the epidemic was widely recognized and reported upon there. People elsewhere would read these reports from Spain in their papers, and thought that Spain was the source of the diseases that were in their towns. In fact, the local authorities knew about earlier and more serious contagious rates, but were bound to keep these a secret.

And many authorities think that the first infections occurred in Kansas (pork industrial workers inducted into the US Army), then spread to Ft.Leavenworth (first actual recorded case), then to the battlefields of WWI (Belgium) where conditions were ripe for a worldwide pandemic transmission.

Oh and by the way, influenza is an RNA virus so it needs to hijack the host cells’ DNA to reproduce itself.

Morning Peterr and Mrs. Dr. Peterr.

My dear himself-Dr.-Adie refuses to watch the telly news for the most part, so he has to put up with me parroting the 2 Drs. Peterr, ha ha.

“Honey, may I read to you?” says I.

“groan, mumble, i guess….” from the other end of the room, where himself is trapped fixing his lunch..

The next few minutes are filled with, “yep, that’s right,” “exactly,” “uh-huh,” *sneaks for door*

“Wait, there’s more!” says I.

“groan, mumble, yep.”

Whereupon I give up harassing the poor chap, who’s been mercifully retired several years now from having to face hoards of little home-schooled & private-schooled winger-spawn and try to penetrate their noggins with some good solid scientific facts concerning evolution to counteract some of the fudgenut trifle with which they graduated highlite school.

One of his favorites is pointing out how much harder you make it to smack those pesky flies you keep swatting on the porch, the more selection pressure you put on the little things. Each surviving generation tending to be a tad quicker to dart into the corners as you ramp up your stealth approach, as it were. So why swat, eh whot?

He earned his medals the hard way, one day at a time, 35 years plus or minus in the classroom and lab.

Did I mention he loves retirement?

Thanks much Peterr and Mrs. Dr. Peter. You do the world a great service along with your colleagues, and ours. I’m not so useful. I tend to get the rabid crazies when I try to listen to or talk to the little things. How can they NOT believe? Because they’re force-fed carefully culled and overly polished nonsense in those faux schools and winger-corrected “textbooks”.

Thank heaven for dedicated profs and school board members, The National Geographic Society, Sir David Attenborough, The Center for Science Education, the Peterr family, and the countless other like-minded folks and organizations across the land!

Please refrain from bad-mouthing perfectly respectable chimps, and all other critters in the universe, with the possible exception of booshchainie Ltd.

I misspoke. The RNA virus hijacks the cell’s machinery but not I think its DNA.

Peterr, please tell that secular humanist wife of yours that the swine flu has nothing to do with evolution. It’s a curse God put on Mexicans for sneaking over the border to work for low wages so they could support their families back home, & on Texicans for sending that Lawrence v. Texas case to the Supreme Court where the Devil’s Advocates ruled in favor of the Sodomites. And if your scientist wife doesn’t believe me, I’ll bet those Texas Board of Education geniuses could find her chapter-and-verse incontrovertible proof in Revelations or Jeremiah or some such.

The Constant Weader at http://www.RealityChex.com

P.S. Obama brought the flu back to the U.S. so he could push thru the Sebelius confirmation — that I can prove because some lady representing the “Concerned Women for America” actually said so.

Do you honestly believe that every single case of swine flu results in hospitalization and correct diagnosis?

That’s the only way your 20-25% death rate figure works.

If, on the other hand, you assume that the vast majority of swine flu cases do not result in hospitalization, as is the case with the regular flu, then those 100 plus deaths will result in a staggeringly low death rate… in line with seasonal flu.

Let’s face it. If you get flu badly enough to go to the hospital right now, you’ll probably be tested for swine flu. This is going to create a massive selection bias, where, if you have *bad* swine flu, you’re likely to be correctly diagnosed. If you had mild swine flu, especially before the pandemic scare, you would NOT have been correctly diagnosed — even assuming you went to the doctor.

Hence, the longer this has gone on, and the higher the panic level, the lower the death rate has gotten, as ever-higher percentages of sick people demand testing, and doctors get more vigilant.

Also, that’s 101 *suspected* deaths. Suspected by the same Mexican health apparatus that suspected 170 yesterday.

If you go to the World Health Organization, you get very different numbers.

2 May 2009 — The situation continues to evolve. As of 18:00 GMT+1, 2 May 2009, 16 countries have officially reported 658 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infection.

Mexico has reported 397 confirmed human cases of infection, including 16 deaths. The higher number of cases from Mexico in the past 48 hours reflects ongoing testing of previously collected specimens. The United States Government has reported 160 laboratory confirmed human cases, including one death.

The following countries have reported laboratory confirmed cases with no deaths – Austria (1), Canada (51), China, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (1), Costa Rica (1), Denmark (1), France (2), Germany (6), Israel (3), Netherlands (1), New Zealand (4), Republic of Korea (1), Spain (13), Switzerland (1) and the United Kingdom (15).

From WHO Page on Swine Flu/A H1N1

So, that’s 16 confirmed deaths so far, out of 658 confirmed cases. Not 101 out of 400.

Even that figure is way too high, judging by seasonal flu. Most likely the vast majority of cases are going completely undiagnosed. As with seasonal flu.

Does this mean we’re NOT all gonna die?

Sigh. The panic-mongering flu cheerleaders must be very depressed by this.

If they had any integrity, they’d be ashamed for calling non-panic-mongers “anti-science”. I realize that’s too much to expect, of course.

I don’t disagree with any points you make. But it’s still been classified as swine flu, I assume because it has the genetic markings of a pig-originated virus. Most importantly, the WHO and other sources referred to it as swine flu in the earliest stages, it only adds confusion to try and change the name at this point. Actions of ignorant governments notwithstanding, corporate interests really shouldn’t be dictating health policy.

This is the first explanation that I have heard about why the flu seemed to be so much more serious in Mexico than in the US. The evolution of the virus to be less virulent makes absolute sense.

We won’t teach you science, but we can and will torture you! I don’t think there is anything in the bible that says you have to educate people appropriately, but I know you are not suppose to LIE.

Christianity at its’ finest.

What “Christianity” are you referring to?

Oh, “…you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free…” seems to infer that education is paramount to a full life. Last time I checked, Christ said that. Not that I expect the religion haters to acknowledge that…

“16 confirmed deaths so far, out of 658 confirmed cases.”

Actually 17…since there was one death confirmed in the US.

I thought we were talking about Mexico…where the rate was according to the WHO site there were 397 confirmed cases and 16 deaths (4% mortality). In fact the number of confirmed cases went up significantly because of genetic testing results. Yesterday the WHO site reported 156 and 9 deaths (5.75%) for Mexico.

http://www.who.int/csr/don/200…..index.html

My understanding is that death rates for seasonal flu are about 1/10th those numbers.

But the non-reporting plays both ways. People might be missed in the initial stages of a viral infection or misdiagnosed as having or dying from something else. That under-reporting would first occur at the outbreak center. As the concern about the illness picks up pace people in areas without the infection might report having flu.

Outside of Mexico the “confirmed” rate is 1/261 (0.4%). That IS right in line with seasonal flu mortality rates.

I thought I was strong enough to resist jumping in here to speculate on the relative IQ’s of ANYONE in texas but I have been swayed back to my roots by facts…

The base-line for this article seems to presume that FACTS actually matter to anyone in the south – especially texas…. The church (any organized version – you pick) or the Klan disputes ALL facts that aren’t in line with their current thread of beliefs. It matters not that ‘outsiders’ keep producing proof that the opposite of what has been told to them from on high at a gathering is truth because all else from ‘outside influence’ be damned…

This is lazy. thoughtless stereotyping of the sort that concurrently infers such hatred that ‘all blacks are lazy’ and ‘all liberals are effete, limp-wristed, spineless latte drinkers.’

My daughter, who lives in Texas, and who graduated cum laude, and who now has a Master’s in biology, is a conservation biologist who has testified before an education committee of the Texas Legislature against introducing creationism into the school curriculum.

She’s also a committed Christian who loves God and prays faithfully. My two grand-children go to a church-based private school in Texas where no such non-scientific theories about how mankind came to be are taught.

Of course, such folks are in the minority in Texas, but so were the people for whom MLK ultimately gave his life for in an attempt to fight against such easy stereotyping.

This how cults are started and continue to thrive…just keep your wits about you…

I’m trying, but you are making it difficult. However, I forgive you for not knowing or acknowledging – or, worse, not indicating any curiosity about – the larger truths out there.

Just like the folks you are condemning.

I don’t see your point about “corporate interests” dictating Health Policy.

The Public Health community suggested this change because people were thinking that they were going to get flu from eating pork products. By using it’s technical name it removes that stigma. It’s the same thing with using HIV rather than something like the “Gay Disease”. When a term gets in the way of understanding the most likely means of transmission (rather than the original source of the infection) it’s better to change the term.

The main folks that I hear complaining about changing the term are the right wing blogs…implying there is some sort of scandal. Maybe you could inform me about what it is?

Hugh, I thought the first reported case (that meets the symptoms of swine flu) was in 1917 in Kansas…then there were large numbers of cases at the front in Belgium (suppressed at the time due to War Secrecy regulations).

And weren’t the typical mortality curves of “young, unhealthy and elderly” confounded in the 1918 pandemic. In fact there was an additional peak of people in their late teens and 20’s. These were the very people that one might expect from a transmission by demobilized forces returning to their homelands. Younger single men who are anxious to celebrate their “freedom” with similarly aged young women. And, of course, there might have been a time lag before the men returned back from bases or decommissioning centers in urban areas to their homes.

I’m more puzzled by the second return of the disease.

I’m torn about this…having been raised in a Southern Baptist family and growing up less than a mile from the notorious Creationist Research Institute in El Cajon that spawned people like Dwaine Gish and Tim LaHaye.

I don’t think that evangelicals are “stupid”. In fact, many are quite brilliant. For example, Francis Collins is the former Director of NIH’s Human Genome Project.

At the same time there is a very serious effort by many to resolve the apparent conflict between Science and Scripture by assuming that the former is an intentional distortion by Scientists (involved in a wanton Satanic plot) while the latter must be read as a LITERAL record of human and Earth’s history. Some of that “brilliance” is involved in the complex and convoluted way they use their intelligence to lead other people, some with less capability to see through their arguments, to their way of thinking.

For example, Michael Behe was a middling cell biologist who had a few papers on (I think) the sodium pump of one species of bacteria. He then became the “boy wonder” of the neo-Creationist Intelligent Design movement with his book “Darwin’s Black Box”. He bought out most of his teaching and research duties and went on tours to churches and Creationist events across the nation. He’s now very, very wealthy, something he would have never achieved as a cell biologist at Tulane. Is he merely an opportunist? I don’t like to disparage the depth of anyones belief systems, but he has frequently presented different positions in different contexts.

Behe quietly admits he accepts “descent with modification” (i.e. evolution, though he won’t use those words, and avoids the topic – focussing most of his criticism on “Darwinian gradual evolution”). And drawing upon evidence from cell biology is perhaps the most limited. Cell biologists use a handful of “model organisms” for their research. Of course there will be vast structural differences between those “model systems”. It’s as if anatomists only had one species each of bacteria, sponges, reptiles and humans to study. There would very little evidence of “evolutionary intermediates” and huge gaps. One would have to invoke miracles to get across those gaps. Fortunately anatomists know about thousands of living species in the branching array of life. Even more they can see evolutionary intermediates in the fossil record. And why that should upset anyone interested in the tremendous reach and “constancy” of the natural forces of a Creator beats me. Scripture can be metaphorical (after all Jesus used parables to explain concepts to those who were unable to understand more complex “theological terminology”(the mustard tree analogy, sheep-shepherd, etc.)

I found an interesting pair of sites that your daughter might be interested in. They’re about a Francis Collins initative to reach out to evangelicals about science and evolution.

Francis Collins Responds on the Congruence of Evolution and Faith

Biologos Initiative