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Wall Street week in bird flu

By revere on January 11, 2007.

Reader K (hat tip) sent along the link to a New Yorker cartoon which seems the ideal accompaniment to this small squib from the MSN financial column, Ahead of the Bell: Bird Flu:i-b3016aeb2563423512fbfc40f92b4218-42983561_f89ae5be55.jpg

NEW YORK (AP) - Bird flu concerns swooped back into the news Wednesday, bringing companies trying to find treatments for the deadly virus back into focus.

The H5N1 bird flu virus typically spreads during traditional flu season as temperatures drop in winter months. The virus is transmitted mostly among birds, but has transferred to humans who are in close contact with them, and health officials fear the H5N1 strain may become pandemic in the future.

[snip]

Several companies may see their shares climb on the heightened concerns, including pharmacutical company Novavax Inc., which licensed drug delivery technology last week from IGI Inc. for use in developing a bird flu vaccine. (Money Central)

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No worry. Business and the economists are going to find the answers/solutions (publicized in the WSJ) that the epidemiologists don't.

The Future of Economics Isn't So Dismal DAVID LEONHARDT, January 10, 2007 New York Times

On a summer day a few years ago, a recent college graduate named Emily Oster was talking to her boyfriend about the research that was, and wasn't, being done on the spread of AIDS. She was an aspiring economist at the time, getting ready to go to graduate school, and she was struck by the fact that her field had little to say about why some countries had such high H.I.V. rates. . . .

So during her time as a Ph.D. student at Harvard, the younger Ms. Oster took on AIDS in Africa. Her most provocative finding was that Africans didn't really behave so differently from people in countries with much lower H.I.V. rates. . . .

"This is not the kind of thing epidemiologists would do. It's not the way they would have framed it," Ms. Oster, now 26, said.

(Admittedly a little selective quoting in the above :-))

The research in that article (posted by JMG3Y) is why the veterinarians included economics in their international epidemiology symposium (International Symposium on Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics, next to be held in South Africa in 2009). Maybe as animal production is often more explicitly about economics people are not so disturbed by such inclusions.

By attack rate (not verified) on 11 Jan 2007 #permalink

That article and cartoon is revolting on many levels. The thought of profiting on the bodies of dead children is why I want to resign from this society. Everything in this culture comes down to profits or the lack of for the elite of this culture. How do they sleep at night?