I don't usually do movie reviews here, much less reviews of movie reviews. But since I was pretty hard on Marc Siegel a year or two ago (I won't link to the posts since that would be just criticizing him all over again; they are on the old site), I'll take the time to say his movie review of Pandemic on the Hallmark channel didn't offend me. I wouldn't have written it that way, but there were some good things in it. What I liked about it was the balanced way he evaluated the veracity and plausibility of the facts portrayed in the movie. Dramatic presentations like this are a mode of public education. It's important they be presented as accurately as can be expected. And there is no reason why we shouldn't expect it. From the review (I haven't seen the movie), the movie makers did a reasonable job (with some exceptions).
Of course I can't resist mentioning that Dr. Siegel couldn't resist a dig at those of us who think H5N1 is the most likely candidate for a catastrophic flu pandemic:
Though the H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza strain has been much publicized and has worried many scientists, it is still primarily a disease in birds, and may not mutate sufficiently to cause the next human pandemic. "If we put all our eggs in this one basket, we can easily miss a mutation in a different virus which becomes the next pandemic strain," says flu researcher Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger of the National Institutes of Health. The movie sends an important message to the public when it shows a non-H5N1 influenza transforming into the pandemic virus. (LA Times)
Yes, it's true it could be another subtype, although I'm not sure it's such an important message. If we prepare our public health system for H5N1, it doesn't make much difference if it turns out to be H9N2. The recent H7N2 in Wales certainly underscored this possibility. But thankfully this is a far cry from the good doctor's previous position that the risk of a flu pandemic had been hyped at the cost of the public's mental health. Now he's saying, "Wait a minute. There are other bird flu viruses out there that might be as bad as some of us think H5N1 can be."
OK. Point taken. Welcome aboard, Dr. Siegel.
Someone lands a frag grenade in the same room. What are the chances of any individual fragment hitting you? Not very much. But the chance of *something* hitting you is pretty damn close to 100%.
Yes SmellyTerror, if a 'transgenic pathogen grenade' is set off -- as it probably has been via a dodgy viral promoter shoved into genetically modified crops eaten by wild birds, etc, since the mid 1990s -- then "the chance of *something* hitting you is pretty damn close to 100%"
"A sign of a true professional is to make something look effort less" -- Brian Finch @ acidrefluxweb.com (2007)
Here's some ISIS.org backgrounder literature alluding to the probable "evolutionary mechanism of transgenic viruses" ie. homologous viral recombination fueled by CaMV 35S, a dodgy viral promoter in genetically modified crops @ "Whos Afraid of Horizontal Gene Transfer? (published Mar 05, 2002)
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/hgt.php
What's in a name!?! My medical and mainstream online news alerts reflect the paradigm for a catastrophic flu pandemic:
Australia's Fairfax Digital News Store Alert:
Alert 1: H5N1(transgenic pathogen)
Alert 2: Transgenic H7N2 and H5N1 recombination and transmission in and between humans
My NCBI what's new results from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) Alert:
Alert 2: What's new for 'H7N2 and H5N1 recombination and transmission in and between humans' in pubmed