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Level 4 Infectious Disease Specialist Here
ID:7bgvDDu6 No.230585890 View ViewReplyOriginalReport
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I work daily with some of the world's most infectious and fatal diseases. Reading internal reports and also stuff available on the internet (papers, new articles), I'm becoming extremely concerned we are massively unprepared for the next epidemic.
People imagine that any kind of epidemic that occurs today can be more or less mitigated through modern public health infrastructure, stocks of vaccines and antivirals, and basic quarantining measures.
The issue is that in modern, densely populated cities, a sufficiently advanced pathogen would be capable of infecting the vast majority of inhabitants in weeks, before any health measures could have an effect. The population density is enough that current quarantining techniques used in cases like smallpox would be completely ineffective. Antivirals have historically proven ineffective and hard to disseminate while our current vaccine stocks might not work at all.
Currently computer simulations indicate that a dangerous enough pathogen could effectively destroy a city like Los Angeles in a few months. "Destroyed" in the sense that emergency services are shut down, medical services are shut down, all economic output ceases and over 30-60% of the population is wiped out.
In short, a small nation-state or even well-funded terrorist organization could easily reduce the US to the state of a third world nation with. Yet no one except my colleagues seems to give a fuck.
Want to know more?
People imagine that any kind of epidemic that occurs today can be more or less mitigated through modern public health infrastructure, stocks of vaccines and antivirals, and basic quarantining measures.
The issue is that in modern, densely populated cities, a sufficiently advanced pathogen would be capable of infecting the vast majority of inhabitants in weeks, before any health measures could have an effect. The population density is enough that current quarantining techniques used in cases like smallpox would be completely ineffective. Antivirals have historically proven ineffective and hard to disseminate while our current vaccine stocks might not work at all.
Currently computer simulations indicate that a dangerous enough pathogen could effectively destroy a city like Los Angeles in a few months. "Destroyed" in the sense that emergency services are shut down, medical services are shut down, all economic output ceases and over 30-60% of the population is wiped out.
In short, a small nation-state or even well-funded terrorist organization could easily reduce the US to the state of a third world nation with. Yet no one except my colleagues seems to give a fuck.
Want to know more?
