It's resistant to Tamiflu.

I'll be glad when we can start fighting bugs like that on our terms (intelligently directed nanobots that detect "that which is not human") instead of on the viruses terms ("chemicals that inhibit the virus but also equate to a evolutionary pressure).

Its stuff like this that keeps me up at night. Even if you quarantine yourself you simply postpone the time before you'll have to become immune to it.

It makes you wonder how far we've really come to be so vulnerable to something so tiny...

But will it still resist Tamiflu after it mutates to human to human transfer capability? Might still be worth having.

Its stuff like this that keeps me up at night. Even if you quarantine yourself you simply postpone the time before you'll have to become immune to it.

Not necessarily. In the case of the flu epidemic of 1918, by 1919 it had pretty much vanished. Anyone who had crawled into a hole for the period of the epidemic (or just isolated themselves for the duration) didn't have to worry about it afterwards.

"intelligently directed nanobots that detect "that which is not human")"

Which would then proceed to kill off all of the tremendously useful bacteria and such that are in us, and if they aren't programmed well, automatically abort any babies (in women). Not a good idea.

I suspect what happened after 1918 was that the flu mutated enough that a less virulent, more easily spread virus developed that provided cross-immunity to the more lethal strain. This is a common pattern in the evolution of infectious diseases that are spread more effectively by somewhat mobile hosts. Ideally (from its 'point of view'), the virus wants to make you only mildly ill, but still contagious (example: the common cold.)

I suspect what happened after 1918 was that the flu mutated enough that a less virulent, more easily spread virus developed that provided cross-immunity to the more lethal strain. This is a common pattern in the evolution of infectious diseases that are spread more effectively by somewhat mobile hosts. Ideally (from its 'point of view'), the virus wants to make you only mildly ill, but still contagious (example: the common cold.)

As I understand it, the 1918 flu is thought to have died out especially now that they've found virus remnants. IIRC, it's classified as an avian flu unrelated to any modern flu that infects humans (except possibly the current version of avian flu that they're so worried about).

I know that diseases that survive do what you say, but it appears to me that the 1918 flu spread so rapidly that it ran out of infectable people.

On a related subject, I think one of the reasons that the 1918 flu took hold was because there was a particularly vulnerable population of soldiers, who were packed together, poorly fed, moved around a lot, and exhausted from years of war (at least in Europe). IIRC (again), the 1918 flu was first noticed in a US training camp somewhere in the midwest and rapidly spread with the movement of US troops to Europe.

In today's world, I'm not sure if there's an equivalent highly susceptible population, but the AIDS epidemic in Africa looks particularly dangerous to me. Here, there are several countries with an extremely high HIV infection rate (many of those people would have weakened immune systems) and with many of the other conditions that would aid transmission of a flu: crowded urban areas, war zones (in the Congo), widespread malnutrition, and unlikely to have an organized defense.

There was SMALL POX and INFLUENZA and then there was the BLACK DEATH(BUBONIC PLEAGE)and many others and then TYPHIOD and the well known TYPHOID MARY