Does disease really have the potential to significantly reduce the world population of humans?
Gyromite
Looking at the Black Death of the 1300′s, lets say 75 million of the world’s +/- 500 million people were killed, that’s still only 15%. AIDS has only killed 25 million. Smallpox did a little better with a ballpark estimate of 300-500 million.
Many of those deaths happened when our medical knowledge was not too great, so you kind of have to assume those were ‘best case scenarios’ so to speak. In modern times, what are the odds of a disease taking out a billion people or so? Something along the lines of Stephen King’s The Stand perhaps.
The odds are very slim. Something like SARS was a pandemic for a while, but was controlled pretty quickly. Today, we know how to deal with things, and know that sometimes, we just have to quarantine people. There is no disease today that could really cause that many deaths.
Yes, and it has a name: The bird flu. Those people you named with aids and only 25 million dead will sky rocket due to their inability to fight off illness. Anyone with a compromised immune system is in big trouble. That means the very young and the elderly. Cancer patients, people with liver disease, heart disease, lung disease. This isn’t a joke, it’s airborne and on its way. If the CDC would only admit it. They are afraid of a panic and they are right to. Stock up on food, 3 mo worth and meds too.
they are predicting a flu pandemic. even with a of our technology we can’t stop they flu. they are predicting that many will die and not just the sick and elderly like with a flu epidemic.
Bubonic plague came out of no where, hit like a hurricaine, went in remission, and then re-appeared every few generations for a few centuries. We could have a similar plague.
i was watching the history channel and they were showing what the black plague did to Asia (fleas on rats) killed off enough people to reverse the role of people the rich became poor (lost their free labor ) and the poor became rich (able to use land from rich that died ) they had no idea what was happining to them we know what caus’s std’s that are killing more than war is today and we all know to protect yourself during times of lust but people are still dieing form it if they knew back then how to fix the problem would they or JUST WAIT TO SEE IF THEY GOT BITTEN so i say yes that disease does a good job of population control by weeding out the weak and stupid ( i do feel sorry that some can nor control themselves ) last word even if we know it will run its course and the uncontrollable will suffer
Bird flu is being compared with the epidemic early in the 20th century. They had no anti-biotics or other “wonder” drugs then and most of the people died of secondary infections such as pneumonia. If reasonable measures are taken there should not be too much of a problem.
for a real problem to occur, you need 2 things:
1) easy transmission.
2) high mortality rate.
normal flu has #1 wired. just breathe.
for #2, it would appear that bird flu is a prime candidate. however, it does not transmit easily.
however, the various strains of flu seem to trade sections of DNA, creating new strains, and making old strains look different to our immune systems.
now the likelihood of a specific mutation occurring is near zero, before it happens.
and 100% after it happens.
so, is bird flu going to be a problem?
probably not.
but if it is, it’s likely to be very serious.