"A Novel Coronavirus Called...."

[Rastus]

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/watch/coronavirus-arabian-peninsula

Have any of you been watching the "progress" of the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) or...to be non-offensive a novel coronavirus?  It's a SARS family of virus and of 50 known cases 27 fatalities on the 31-MAY-13 posting at the Centers For Disease Control. 

What is distressing...besides the outward mortality rate...is that 3 of the people who expired in Saudi the other day had been hospitalized for a month.  Which causes one to wonder how many of the 50 known cases are recoveries and for those who are not a current recovery what will be the eventual disposition for them?

With such few cases I am hoping it's really hard to pass around.

[tombogan03884]

Is this the one I saw a recent report about it mutating so it no longer responds to known treatments ?

[Rastus]

Maybe.  They say it responds to one type of anti-viral drug early on....but I wonder if that just means prolongs or what.  WHO has some additional info on it too.

[twyacht]

The WHO, no not the band, is kinda right up there with the efficiency of the UN.

SARS, MERS, E-Bola, Bird Flu, none of these were around 20 years ago, and they make HIV/AIDS look tame as it's a lot harder to get.

Reminded of a skit about germs, diseases, infections, from George Carlin

Uh.....Language Warning..But he's spot on...

[fatbaldguy]

The WHO, no not the band, is kinda right up there with the efficiency of the UN.

SARS, MERS, E-Bola, Bird Flu, none of these were around 20 years ago, and they make HIV/AIDS look tame as it's a lot harder to get.

Reminded of a skit about germs, diseases, infections, from George Carlin

Uh.....Language Warning..But he's spot on...

Funny as all hell!  My immune system is tempered in raw garbage, 5 days a week!  Germs?  Germs?  What germs!

[Sponsor]

[tombogan03884]

Ebola is nasty sh!t.
When Tom Clancy wrote his book "Rainbow Six" he got a lot of input from medical researchers .
The book contains detailed descriptions of how the disease runs it course .
Compared to any other disease , chemical, or biological weapon I've ever heard of this tops the list as the absolute nastiest sh!t .

[Rastus]

The only good thing about ebola is that it is quick and manifestations of it burn themselves out so quickly more people cannot be infected.

[tombogan03884]

The only good thing about ebola is that it is quick and manifestations of it burn themselves out so quickly more people cannot be infected.

Only because it generally occurs in the remote regions in Africa so people can't get far enough fast enough to infect others .
If some one exposed to it were to get on a airliner it would be a very very bad thing.

[JoeG]

No it stops when it hits modern western hygiene practices in real hospitals. It is very nasty but relatively hard to pass on as it needs blood contact. When the dead are handled and kept in the home for a while as local customs proscribe it is passed on to those who clean the body with no gloves etc.

Disease is brutal and Clancy did a good job of describing symptoms. He simplified how to passage it through hosts to get it to mutate and be more human transmissible. Funny though as the technique is 100 years old and well documented in peer reviewed journals.

Mers could be bad but it is too early to tell. It is not all that transmissible yet H2H. It is getting lots of press (both MSM and scientific) as it is newly discovered. Note that just means the virus was isolated from a sick person recently not that it has never infected someone before. It could have been around at a low level and assumed to be some other agent due to lack of testing. We have recently gotten really good at virus hunting. You don't know what you don't know.

[tombogan03884]

So far "MERS" seems like a Muslim version of "Sickle cell anemia".