I don't know if anyone else has gotten this vibe, but I find how suddenly all these people are buying gas masks, and now some people are DECORATING them or buying cool looking ones just seems so...cyberpunk to me.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthpi...-in-Mexico.html

heh, i was just remarking at chow today that if i was stateside during this 'epidemic' id be driving around town with my GI gas mask, just to see people's reactions.
when i was a kid i had one and used to mow the lawn wearing it to combat my hay fever, resulting in weird looks from the neighbors

Somehow that brings to my mind -

"Luke, I am your father."

Its not Cyberpunk... its Shadowrun, VITAS I. They just haven't figured out the right name yet.

Zomg no. It's just fucking hype, like SARS was. OMG, a couple of old people died from a special flu strain. Like tens of thousands die every year from regular flu. Wake me when something actually happens. At least SARS was cool cause Hong Kong is cyberpunk.

Well, the weird thing is that it is killing people in the 25-40 age range primarily.

This will become a big baddie in the industrialized nations only if they sit there and do nothing.

The first world is a very hard target for epidemic now.

Largely because hospitals can communicate so quickly and completely now. The first hospital that gets a rush of a new pathogen can let EVERYONE know in a few hours.

According to the World Health Organization, there have been 7 deaths from this flu... 7... the others are actually misreported. http://www.smh.com.au/world/only-7-swine-f...90429-aml1.html

If you go to the WHO website, they've upgraded the number of deaths to 8
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2009_04_29/en/index.html

And here's the site that lists the updates
http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/en/index.html

Isn't that how hysteria works though? Kids have a greater chance of dying from cancer then they do being abducted by a stranger in the USA, but every parent freaks out at the thought of some guy tossing around free candy. Our media likes everything 'BIG'.

Guys, this is the Shadowrun section. Can we Shadowrun it up a little?

VITAS, look where it started.

i could have sworn i have seen images of japanese girls wearing artisitc face masks as part of their outfit...

The big concern about this one, from the epidemological perspective, is the recombination process. The replication process is sloppy business, essentially just demolishing the virus' genetic information and rebuilding it again - along with any genetic material in the area. There's at least one regular influenza strain going around right now that is almost entirely pharma-resistant. Combine that with the lack of background immunity to H1N1, and you've got the potential for a major outbreak.

I also have no idea what the hell the State Department is doing. The common line I hear when the border question comes up is "Well, it's already here!", which is a load of (hehe) hogwash, since there's still no reason to allow illegal traffic to bring it over regardless. Between swine flu and the (now literal) drug war, Mexico may be ready for Feral Cities 2.0 well in advance of the book.

Also.. picture 14 of the OP gallery. Wiskey tango foxtrox, do you copy?

Don't Aztlaners buy specially decorated respirators? Shadowrun and real life, they're closer than you think!

Fix'd for more funny

Well, Earlydawn, he doesn't like the Black Sheriffs (Schwarzen Sheriffs in German), i think there is the shadowrun connection
My Gamemaster once brought us to Munich and i saw a Drone flying around with two S written on it. I never heard of the Black Sheriffs since then and went like "OMG, Nazis in southern AGL!"

meh... I'll start worrying when they begin burning bodies in the streets...

The chances of that happening with the Flu given the stockpiles of Tamiflu and other anti-virals that most countries have stockpiled is pretty minuscule.

I'm more concerned about bacteria than virus anyhow, If we ended up with a nasty strain of drug resistant TB making the rounds we'd see a lot more dead people.

Really though, worrying about some epidemic disease killing us all is like worrying about when an asteroid is going to hit the planet and kill us all. The chances of it happening are pretty damn slim and if it does there's nothing we're going to be able to do about it anyhow so *shrug*.

Holy shit, there are only 40 confirmed cases world wide! BREAK OUT THE HAZMAT SUITS, BATMAN!

If option #2 occurs, some goverment J is going to hire Bruce Willis oil drigging crew for a run.

'Standard' Influenza kills an estimated 250,000 - 500,000 worldwide annually, with up to an estimated 36,000 in America.

While swine flu has the potential to become a serious pandemic, for some reason I doubt that will happen.

It seems the outbreak started in Veracruz, not right into Mayan territory, but not that far from it ! The Mayan calendar predicts the end of the Fifth World for December, 2012 (I know Shadowrun says 2011, but, come on, as usual, SR line will be late on schedule, and the two calendars will finally match). The actual place of the outbreak, is La Gloria, near the Cofre de Perote volcano, that the Aztec called Naucampatepetl, which means "four times lord" in Nahuatl. And we're in the Fifth World, there were exactly four times the world was destroyed !

We're all doomed !!!

Two SR thoughts:

1) Aztechnology loses control of a prototype from their secret biowarfare labs...
2) It becomes culturally okay to wear masks in a bank during an epidemic...

That isn't good.

Okay, this is a bit off-topic but I'm running with it anyway because it has to do with technological change. When I was in the Army in '92-'96 in Germany, I felt a whole lot more cut-off from current events in the U.S. than it seems like today's soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are. I think this is a good thing, but it's striking to me how quickly things change. When I was on field exercises in the forests of Germany, we didn't have any idea what was going on in the "real world." It took two days for the "news" that Kurt Cobain had killed himself to filter out to us by word of mouth. No, I don't remember why that was a big deal. Actually, I do, but it seems a bit laughable now. Anyway, my point is that I'm amazed at how able modern soldiers are to take the trappings of the uber-connected iPhone age and transport it with them to the war zones. Anyone have any more profound thoughts on this observation?

I think in general it helps with the soldiers morale. Knowing that at home, everything or everyone is ok, is one less thing to worry about.

Military applications of iPhone and iPod by newsleak: http://www.newsweek.com/id/194623

However, what is important is hardware hacking. That means taking a device and using it for something its issuers did not perceive at the time. It means that taking trophy photos and sending them on the internet is a button away. It also means that intelligence from the battlefield to the wider civilian people no longer flows through black rooms and government censors. It also means that there is a greater likelihood of utilising mobile phones during operations for communication than before.

Civilian phone connections will become increasingly important not only from a strategic point of view but a tactical one.

To summarize, I think the most important development really is that the military and government cannot filter information from the states and back. Not easily anyways.

1.) That is retarded. You're not supposed to get your N95 wet.

2.) Gas mask =/= surgical mask. Gas mask =/= N95.

3.) People running around wearing surgical masks have no idea what they're doing.

That number is incorrect.

Also, confirmed cases =/= actual number of cases. Confirmed case means that someone took a sputum sample or something and cultured it, which doesn't happen most of the time.

The confirmation process is under way in places like Mexico, but it takes a long time, and so of the 150+ deaths there that are suspected, only a fraction have been confirmed yet. The number confirmed is likely to rise as the process continues.

For cable news, ratings > facts. Calling it the black death gets more people to watch. Or rather, they don't say "It's the black death," they say "Could it be the next Black Death?" and then they interview an expert who says "No." But only after you stay tuned past like 11 commercial breaks.

All information you need:

http://promedmail.org

Don't watch TV. They're spreading propagada bullshit mostly.

A valid point, but Tenochtit'lan ??? is cyberpunk too. NAFTA, Atzlan, Cartels, Human sacrifice... Gibson and Stephenson show cyberpunk's Mexican influenza

Good recall, it all fits.

i could discuss this but for two reasons:
1) my opinion may be biased

2) that could seriously highjack this thread maybe start another one in the general section?

You are correct. We're up to 360something confirmed cases in Mexico.

Still.

I wouldn't call it a pandemic until we were at 300 thousand cases world wide. Even then if 100% of those died we'd lose less than a tenth of one percent of the world population.

More people die from sharks each year. Ok, exaggeration. Shark deaths are rather uncommon (50 to 70 a year, most of which don't result in death) but you get the idea.

This is utter bulldrek. You and I know that its the Sea Dragon who keeps this information campaign open.
She and her minions kill thousands a month. Keep landlocked lads, its the only way to stay alive.

Land-locked is not safe from the street sharks!

Damn, you beat me to it!

A pandemic is essentially a wide-spread (usually global) epidemic. An epidemic is any disease outbreak larger than expected based on recent experience. Thus, if seasonal flu kills 500,000 annually, it is just a disease. If that increases to 600,000, it is an epidemic. Likewise, if you take a relatively rare disease (say, rabies), with 5 confirmed cases in a single community, it is an epidemic, because it is greater than the norm.

It's what we call the News

Right, which is why I find the whole thing silly. There's roughly 1000 cases around the world compared with "normal" flu at millions. I suppose it's an epidemic/pandemic because it's pig flu and there shouldn't be any at all.
Of course, we can't call it "pig flu" anymore, because the pig factory farmers are upset because it's not THEIR pigs. It's 2009H1N1. *Rolls eyes*



Yeah, that's about right. News used to operate at a deficit because it was funded by the entertainment division. Then this whole idea came about trying to make "news" entertaining. At which point it ceased being "news."

(I can at least get within 1000km of Kabul, if not closer--depends on if I've managed to correctly find the country on an unlabled map and haven't confused it with Pakistan or Iran (yeah, I was having that trouble while playing Globetrotter XL, after about 30 countries I was unfamiliar with down to "correct continent" I started messing up really bad, particularly with the middle east)).

I think they didn't call it pig flu because pig I think is fairly informal, while swine is a technical word. Look at usda.gov for pig and swine and see which gets more (and more appropriate) hits. That's also why it's avian flu, not bird flu.

I haven't heard anything about anyone using not using the word swine flu because of fear of upsetting swine.

WR, what's the difference between an N95 utility mask (like for cleaning up lead paint), N95 surgical mask and a conventional gas mask? Aren't they all N95? Aren't they all absolutely sporting while visiting Firt National to deposit your paycheck?

http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/topics/resp...s/respfact.html

Interesting, but doesn't really answer my question. Is one filtered for biologicals while the other for chemicals or something?

Not upsetting swine, upsetting pork factory owners.

And you're obviously not listening to enough NPR.

Respirators protect the user in two basic ways. The first is by the removal of contaminants from the air. Respirators of this type include particulate respirators, which filter out airborne particles; and "gas masks� which filter out chemicals and gases. Other respirators protect by supplying clean respirable air from another source. Respirators that fall into this category include airline respirators, which use compressed air from a remote source; and self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA), which include their own air supply.

Respirators should only be used as a "last line of defense" when engineering control systems are not feasible. Engineering control systems, such as adequate ventilation or scrubbing of contaminants should be used to negate the need for respirators.

NIOSH issues recommendations for respirator use. Industrial type approvals are in accordance to the NIOSH federal respiratory regulations 42 CFR Part 84. Development of respirator standards are in concert with various partners from government and industry.

See NIOSH 42 CFR Part 84 for further information.

I don't think they did it just because the pork industry wanted it. But I'm pretty sure the WHO and the CDC don't want to accidentally demolish anyone's industry. It's not like swine farmers have used lobbyists to gain control of those organizations, it's just that the name swine flu was starting to cause a lot of collateral damage. Several governments have banned pork imports or even started culling pig herds just because of the name. And no doubt many people are afraid to eat pork for no reason. I understand skepticism of government, but let's give credit where it's due. They changed the name because it was confusing people and hurting an industry for no reason whatsoever. It isn't corrupt to avoid accidentally demolishing industries at random, is it?

When did I say it was corrupt? If anything, I said it was politically incorrect.

SURGE. The cause of all my problems. Fecking mutants.

Not really, but you're not the only one who's commented on it, so I wasn't responding to you only. Implying that government does something that an industry wants is implying causation, that the only reason they did it is because the industry wanted it. Hence, it implies corruption. That might not be what you meant, but I just wanted to throw my 2 yen into the ring in case that's the conclusion people were drawing. Government might be corrupt sometimes, but in this case, they did the right thing for the right reasons.

All I know is that governments do what the corporate council tells them to, or they perish in a revolution. There hasn't been a government I could believe in since 2030.

just how old are you, max? arent you getting a little long in the tooth to be runnin' the shadows? leave it to the young and foolhardy, or are you the J type who doesnt want to get his hands dirty? me? my respirator's painted like a cyber-skull

I am anceint but not Ancient History. Watch the node so I can raise my boys aware.

Also, because I do a wee bit of fixing work on the side. To buy pretty toys and the like. Maybe save up for a little Leonization.

That is if this new strain of VITAS don't kill me. With all the hype around it, I am starting to look into Horizon as the cause.

BlueMax
/older than dirt.
// Technically a dwarf.
/// Back in my day, you could add any race you wanted to the archetypes in the book.
////struth