Death From Above

UW, Fred Hutch and Los Alamos National Laboratory have been collaborating to study the potential spread of avian flu if it were ever to mutate into a human-to-human virus. They used supercomputers to, uh, supercompute how quickly the virus would travel and its possible course as well as what mitigating factors might be successful. The study lists school closures, vaccination and antiviral drugs as possible roadblocks to the virus.

“Based on the present work . . . we believe that a large stockpile of avian influenza-based vaccine containing potential pandemic influenza antigens, coupled with the capacity to rapidly make a better-matched vaccine based on human strains, would be the best strategy to mitigate pandemic influenza,” say the authors, Timothy Germann of Applied Science and Methods Development (X-1-SEC1), Kai Kadau of Explosives and Organic Materials (T-14), Catherine Macken of Theoretical Biology and Biophysics (T-10) and Ira Longini.

Yeah, yeah, according to the maps we're all dead anyway. See that map above? The red doesn't indicate Republican voters - It's actually worse than that. The red indicates areas of 100 or more infections out of 1000 residents. That's...(where's a supercomputer when you need one?) ten percent of us. The video is even scarier if you're up for that kind of thing.

See the April 11th issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the print edition.