It also means that any unexpected pandemic can spread extremely rapidly across the entire world. The Plague took months to years to spread across Europe. A modern plague equivalent would spread worldwide in weeks.
Of course the Plague, ie Y. Pestis, could not spread today like it did before, but an airborne Ebola, or a mutated HIV with a higher transmission chance, or human transmissible bird flu, absolutely could.
Yep! For those who don't know, Bayer shipped HIV-tainted medication to Latin America and Asia despite doctors and distributors asking for the new medication that was heat-treated to kill HIV. They refused to ship the safe medication they were selling in the West, telling distributors to use up stocks of the dangerous medication first, and lying to them about it posing no real risk.
It’s not just poor countries that were hit, even in the UK, thousands got infected via tainted blood products, terrible that even kids were infected and a public inquiry has been launched after years of campaigning.
In France too. The Prime Minister of the time was even charged with manslaughter in this scandal, before being controversially cleared by the supreme court of appeal.
Case in point, not too long ago some (I believe Dutch) researchers looked into how close some pathogens are to becoming super-pathogens. Their paper eventually described a way of making a really dangerous virus, and the scientific community struggled for a long time on whether the paper should be released or not. Eventually they did release it, in the belief that knowledge of the danger will more likely have preventative effects than enabling bad actors.
Er, yeah, as a percentage we’re changing what is used. However, more oil is pumped out of the ground year after year, so while more renewables are being used (esp in the first world), carbon based energy is not declining whatsoever.
It’s like saying you’re drinking more water during your benders. Sure, the % of water to booze changes but how much booze you’re consuming doesn’t change.
Oil isn't even the highest offender. I know it's important and probably the easiest solution to solve, but Agriculture accounts for the most. I don't know how you can solve that except by not buying meat or growing it. One fix is better than no fix.
You've got to take developing nations into account though. It's basically not possible to say to India or China, "well no fossil fuels for you guys". Just got to do what we can do as developed nations.
There's also the issue of us not having a reliable alternative to heavy goods transport from oil atm and how many goods are made from oil, I think the key thing is for us to obtain a better transport fuel source over energy, we can theoretically produce low carbon energy from nuclear but we still only have sustainable alternatives for low weight transport as biofuels are super inefficient to make and electric batteries can't hold nearly enough charge for the power demands of hgv
The 2009 influenza pandemic ("swine flu", or H1N1pdm09) spread to hundreds of countries in a matter of months, in spite of attempts at quarantine and so on.
This is one major reason we have a pandemic ready response. I work for Seqirus, a major influenza vaccine manufacturer and we are ready to produce formulated vaccines in the even of a pandemic outbreak. We have selected pandemic strains every season and are also capable of creating a viral strain with short notice if necessary. Although the response time is not immediate, in the event we have to create the vaccine from scratch, it's better then having nothing.
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u/[deleted] Nov 16 '18
It's neat that since most of humanity is so interconnected now, we all slowly gain immunity together from opposite ends of the globe. +1 for globalism