Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Any idea what % of people actually get vaccinated / year and the cost? I wonder how much Merck makes.

http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/1 ... /S131.full





Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) CDC cost $19.91 Private Sector cost $59
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/vf ... rice-list/

Even the extortion rates given to the private sector in the US aren't prohibitive. Prices range from $68-120.
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2011/04/adu ... cines.html

And, there are many free programs around the country.

From NYT: Bill Gates: The Ebola Crisis Was Terrible. But Next Time Could Be Much Worse

Isn't that the guy who got ultra rich pitching crummy bug-laden junk? Not sure if I should trust him.

@jennypenny: eh. It is funny how the response from the left is always a top down, more control, approach. What we NEED, is a military budget and command structure, reporting rules that the weak nations must comply to, etc...
Alternate solutions would include self help kits air dropped on disease sites, and quarantine. Improving conditions in poor countries, by fixing the conditions that keep them poor. Rule of law, private property rights, education, etc. Raise the baselines, rather than swooping in and becoming the world's helicopter mom. But swooping in to save people from themselves is the only thing that seems to motivate the left.

Watching the refugee situation in Europe, I can't help thinking that it's the perfect set up for a horrible flu season. It's also possible that MERS could make it's way it's to Europe with the refugees. Either would further complicate an already difficult situation.

The European refugee situation was a predictable clusterfuck. It's too hard to combine open borders, a generous welfare state, and supporting aggressive military adventurism at the same time without incurring material blowblack gien geographic proximity to the hot zones (ME). I suppose that anyone focusing most of their energies on getting elected don't have the mental energy to put these [three or four] things together or communicating their election strategy in a format that some majority can easily digest. So here we are ...

In other news, JMG lost his bet. We're still alive. Someone is enjoying their whisk[e]y now.---I figured HMG would lose because the exponential nature turned the bet into a rate-bet which could be either way and a model-bet which would work against JMG as the exp would converge to a sigmoid. Crap ... I should comment more. So as to get a free drink. ;-P

jacob wrote:The European refugee situation was a predictable clusterfuck.....

Perpetual growth requires immigrants. European politics made the immigration solution untenable.

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

Ebola is not over when it's over.

Well if it didn't cripple the health care system when it was spreading exponentially, it gets a second chance with thousands of survivors experiencing chronic conditions and acute symptom flareups. The possibility of the virus living on in the survivor for months or more may mean this becomes a cyclic threat and continual drain on resources.

Some health experts say the USA hasn't learned key lessons from Ebola experience

Article about how unprepared we still are for Ebola and MERS.

Ebola can come back even after being declared 'Ebola-free'

From the article (emphasis mine):
"The reality is this outbreak's not over," says Dr. William Fischer, speaking about Ebola. "It's just changed."
The World Health Organization had declared in May and then again in September that transmission of Ebola in Liberia had come to a halt. Both announcements turned out to be premature. In June, a 17-year-old boy died of the disease; the source of his infection was unknown.
And now there are the three new cases. WHO officials say the latest cases hadn't been in contact with any known Ebola survivors or done anything else that would have put them at obvious risk of getting the disease.

Looks to me like the fear of Ebola becoming endemic to the region could be coming true. Not good for West Africa.

I understand that they don't know everything about the disease. What bothers me is that they always act so confident and cavalier and then later admit that they don't know as much as they thought they did.

The story about the nurse having a relapse ten months later is disturbing. I'm not sure how these things work -- does the fact that the disease seems to be lurking in people for long periods of time mean that it's more likely to mutate?

The CDC has expanded their investigation and is now looking into the possibility that the Chipotle E-coli outbreak is a deliberate act. Scary stuff, especially since the first reports of illness were over two months ago and they haven't determined the source yet. Doesn't bode well for the CDC's ability to respond quickly to this kind of thing.

The biggest threat to modern medicine and healthcare:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35153795

Fermentation of fear. Ebola is gone so now we have zika. We can dissect the fear mongering and see how it grows.

The Journal Cell just published a paper on the cloning of the zika virus to study it.

http://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/p ... 0200-1.pdf

Don't bother clicking over because there is nothing terribly exciting there. Scientists have been cloning viruses since the 1970s. No big deal. There is no reason to publish the fact that it was done for zika. No reason except to create fodder for the news cycle, to create fear, to create funding.

Sad bold new world we live in.

Ego wrote:There is no reason to publish the fact that it was done for zika. No reason except to create fodder for the news cycle, to create fear, to create funding.

Yeah there is. The authors are offering up their cDNA clone so that other people can use it as a resource to help study the virus. Generally when you make something that other scientists are going to use, it's, you know, kinda important that you tell people 1) how you did it, and 2) show that it is effective. Reproducibility or something scientifically trivial like that... That is the point of the article.

Ego wrote:Sad bold new world we live in.

Alright, contrarian hat on here, but I think it's pretty impressive how fast scientists have been able to generate information about zika. It basically went from nearly completely unknown to now having pretty solid tools for research (which are already generating pretty useful data) within what...6 months?? In the basic science world, that is quite a quick turnaround. Just the review process for a single scientific article (that is, after all the work is done) can easily take 6 months. I've been ignoring the mainstream news megaphone about zika for the last few weeks, though, so maybe you are right about the hype.

black_son_of_gray wrote:

Ego wrote:There is no reason to publish the fact that it was done for zika. No reason except to create fodder for the news cycle, to create fear, to create funding.

Yeah there is. The authors are offering up their cDNA clone so that other people can use it as a resource to help study the virus. Generally when you make something that other scientists are going to use, it's, you know, kinda important that you tell people 1) how you did it, and 2) show that it is effective. Reproducibility or something scientifically trivial like that... That is the point of the article.

It seems someone agrees with me. Hot off the presses today.
http://www.virology.ws/2016/05/19/scien ... a-problem/
Okay, maybe it is me agreeing with him. Whatever.

@ Ego: I actually agree with your linked article - thanks for posting it. I guess I was just responding to a literal interpretation to your comments. There are obvious reasons to publish the paper, but I wholeheartedly agree that editorial decisions at the most prestigious science journals are a big issue. I've had the pleasure of submitting papers to these types of journals and had the "not exciting enough" comment come back to me as well...

There is a pretty messed up incentive structure in modern biomedical science, and the consequences are bleeding into the general culture.

black_son_of_gray wrote:I guess I was just responding to a literal interpretation to your comments.

I figured that was the case.

Scientists who understand the intricacies a particular threat have a responsibility to be good models for the proportionality of the response. When a big journal accepts a relatively unimportant paper like this one it is a hint to those of us who are relatively ignorant to recalibrate our worry-meter. We simpletons should be able to look to them for guidance.

When they start feeding the fear cycle we are all doomed.

Ego wrote:When they start feeding the fear cycle we are all doomed.

OTOH, climate science is a great example of scientists trying their damnedest to be conservative and euphemistic in their statements, e.g. "Future temperature in southwest Asia projected to exceed a threshold for human adaptability"(*), resulting in doing too-little/too-late and continuously having to revise upwards because things "surprisingly" always seem to proceed faster and be worse than initially reported.

(*) Military planners would phrase that somewhat differently. (Count how many times nuclear war is mentioned in this report.)

Both are examples of in/advertently trying to skew the risk-response. The best(**) strategy is to report expectation values (in the mathematical sense) rather than lower or upper p-levels. That is, for accurate policy responses, scientists should be reporting at the 50% level, e.g. we're predicting a 50% that the correct value is higher than X and also 50% that it's lower than X. Whereas the conservative approach is to say, there's less than 5% chance that it will be worse than X.

(**) Of course "best" is a matter of perspective. Best as in best for what/whom?

The problem is that the public and policy planners (most of whom don't have a scientific background) don't pay attention to the p-levels which gives much more weight to the wording and the timing of the wording than scientists, who intuitively look at the p-levels, would do.