Skip to main content

Host Species Barrier to Influenza Virus Infections

The title of this entry was taken from a paper written by Thijs Kuiken, Edward C. Holmes, John McCauley, Guus F. Rimmelzwaan, Catherine S. Williams, and Bryan T. Grenfell. This paper appeared in SCIENCE Volume 312, pp 394 – 397. If you have the gumption to really know how viral infections cross the species barrier, then this is the paper for you. It’s written as a “perspective” rather than as a technical publication, which means there isn’t a bunch of jargon in it.

You can also contact the authors of the paper at t.kuiken@erasmusmc.nl.

A particularly interesting quote taken from the paper:

“It is well established that, as the proportion of susceptibles in the population, s, drops (as individuals become infected, then recover), the number of secondary cases per infection, R, also drops: R = s * R0. If R is less than 1, as is currently the case for H5N1 virus in humans, an infection will not cause a major epidemic.” (pg. 312) The value, R0, “is the number of secondary cases produced when an infected individual is introduced into a well-mixed local population of wholly susceptible individuals.” (pg. 312)

When you read this paper, keep in mind the wonder drug Tamiflu is an interferon based drug. There is wide knowledge that H5N1 has a record of circumventing that type of therapy (a case in 1997). For that reason, all of the stockpiled Tamiflu in your closet will do nothing for your H5N1 infection except act like an expensive placebo.

Popular posts from this blog

Stock Option Debt Income

The 2024 Presidential election has brought out a topic of interest that seems to have been perverted. There is this "Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains" [1] movement that is being falsely attributed to Vice President Harris. Clearly, this is a change in the revenue code that was designed by someone in office long before VP Harris was in office. My money is on Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. What is this change in the revenue code though? For that you have to understand what Silicon Valley zillionaires are doing with their stock options. Many of these people in this special economic area have huge discounts on stock prices for companies that are not public yet, or are public and can not be sold [2]. To be fair to these holders of equity, banks allow them to finance debt using leverage against those options. If you hold an option that is worth $5M then a bank might lend you a share of that value, thus realizing a debt against the option [3]. This is a fair debt instrument and...
Read more

A Self Defeating Race False Narrative

2020 is the year of the pandemic. The SARS-Cov-2 (Covid19) virus has rampaged across the planet infecting 4,893,136 [1] people by May 20, 2020. At this time, of those 4.8M people, 323,256 people have perished from complications that arise from the infection. Arising out of this pandemic has been a narrative about non-white ethnic groups being disproportionately affected by the infection [6,7,8]. A narrative that conditions people to believe that they are perpetually victims only creates a "collective victimhood" [4,5] in that group. This "collective victimhood" costs its members millions in unrealized potential, sends them cowering from social interactions that would otherwise benefit them, and ultimately creates an environment that perpetuates itself. Let's try to dispel that false narrative and deal just with data. I pulled my data from the CDC [9] looking at mortality only. The mortality data from CDC contains per-state mortality rates on a per-infectio...
Read more

Number of Primes

Anderson's Theorem (a) The number of primes in [1,n] is no more than 2+floor(n/2). The probability of n being prime when n is not prime is 1/2 - see Dasgupta,Papadimitriou,Vazirani "Algorithms" page 26. Therefore, the E(pi(n)) is n/2. (b) There does not exist another set of adjacent primes other than {1,2,3} 5: 2 + floor(5/2) = 2 + 2 = 4:=> {1,2,3,5} : 4 <= 4 7: 2 + floor(7/2) = 2 + 3 = 5 => {1,2,3,5,7} : 5 <= 5 11: 2 + floor(11/2) = 2 + 5 = 7 => {1,2,3,5,7,11} 6 <= 7 26: 2 + floor(26/2) = 15 => {1,2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23} : 10 <= 15 Lagrange's Theorem is Inaccurate Lagrange's theorem about primes states that pi(x) is the number of primes <= x. The pi(x) is approximately x/ln(x). He postulated that the lim of pi(x)/(x/lnx) as x-> infinity was 1. This is incorrect. if the number of primes is bounded by n/2 then refactoring and reducing Lagrange's Theorem results in the lim of ln(x) as x approaches infinity. This is alwa...
Read more