H1N1 Swine Flu Still Spreading, Still Caused by Low Diversity

Today's healthcare roundup by DemFromCT on DailyKos points to a Reuters story about the spread and hospitalization rates from the swine flu virus:

... The H1N1 swine flu virus killed a vice principal at a New York City school over the weekend and has spread to 48 states. While it appears to be mild, it is affecting a disproportionate number of children, teenagers and young adults.

This includes people needing hospitalization -- now up to 200, said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"That's very unusual, to have so many people under 20 to require hospitalization, and some of them in (intensive care units)," Schuchat told reporters in a telephone briefing. ...

Flu season, health officials say in the article, is usually done by May, so new cases should be ramping downward. Up to 100,000 people may have the new H1N1 flu (as opposed to the regular, seasonal H1N1 or H3N2 viruses) and it seems to be hitting young people much worse than the elderly, which is an unusual pattern.

If you've been stopping by here recently, you probably already know that at least one of the viral ancestors of this current flu was a virus first spotted on a North Carolina factory hog farm. Researchers have been warning for years that the immuno-compromised populations of factory farms, plus their constant vaccinations and antibiotic dosing, are a model breeding ground for epidemic diseases.

Certain people in world governments who don't know any better have responded to the public health threat posed by factory farms by ... wait for it ... decrying the threat posed by small, mixed-species farms, and often slaughtering the animals on such subsistence farms without recompense.

But as it happens, the presence of multiple species of animals can be as much a bulwark against disease as cramped, homogenous populations can be encouraging of it:

... It's obvious that biodiversity is a good thing, but we're still discovering new ways that it helps us. Indeed, a new study gives more evidence that reduced biodiversity can increase the chances that certain diseases will jump from animals to humans. "In the last few years, scientists have increasingly noticed that, when biodiversity dips, rates of Lyme disease, West Nile virus, SARS and other infectious diseases rise. Called zoonotic diseases, these illnesses also spread from animals to people." ...

Biological first principles: 1; Modern efficiency: 0.

As the news article covering the biodiversity research points out, scientists still need to determine which combinations of species are best. But I'd guess they're going to find that the usual equilibrium for a given ecosystem is probably healthiest because if it weren't, that ecosystem would have succumbed to negative selection pressure.

That may sound simplistic, but competition in nature is fierce and constant. Poorly adapted species, or species that couldn't stand up to opportunistic invasions, have fared badly.

Anyway, reality is that we aren't getting back to Eden and the swine flu is out of the bag. But in future, maybe, maybe we could be a little smarter about how we manage things. Because if we're being graded on our natural resource management to date, we're probably flunking out.