| Thursday, August 15th, 2013 | | | | |  | | | A Better Way to Fight the Flu | | | - What the Earth would look like with a Russian-proof set of bunny ears...
- Progress, Perfectibility and the End of History revisited (briefly)...
- Plus, Ray Blanco on the need for a better flu vaccine... and why it's bound to make some investors a ton of money...
|
| | | | | | | CANCELLATION REQUEST >>
Did you see our publisher's odd request last week? He's asking readers of Lifetime Income Report, Outstanding Investments, Penny Stock Fortunes, Addison Wiggin's Apogee Advisory and Capital & Crisis... to cancel their subscriptions. Hundreds of readers have already taken him up on this unusual offer. But we didn't see your name on the "unsubscribe" list. So here's a reminder to please cancel your subscription as soon as possible. Click here to find out why he's making this odd request. | | | | | | | | Greg Kadajski, wondering if he can 3-D print a less invasive government...
 | | Greg Kadajski | "Every time you feel tempted to put your faith and trust in the government," a friend cautioned at dinner last night, "just remember they once launched half a billion copper needles into space in hopes of building a Russian-proof set of bunny ears."
He had just regaled us with an article in Wired magazine about a Cold War military program designed to create the largest radio antenna in human history. Their "goal was to protect the nation's long-range communications in the event of an attack from the increasingly belligerent Soviet Union."
In the end, they tried to install a metal ring around the Earth like the rings around Saturn. Fortunately for we the living... they failed.
"Americans at the end of the 20th century," Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin wrote in Financial Reckoning Day by way of explaining such a phenomenon, "had begun to think that progress was the nature of things, and that the level of technological and organizational perfection they had achieved had brought on the blessings of progress at a faster rate than ever before."
Unfortunately, innovation, as this example demonstrates, does not necessarily lead to progress.
"In math, science and technology," Addison summarized a few months ago. "learning is linear. Each idea gets built on the innovations that have gone before it. In politics and economics, as in love and war, we keep making the same dumb mistakes over again."
That is especially true when it comes to medical research. As Dr. Ron Paul pointed out in yesterday's issue, with the boondoggle that the Affordable Care Act has become, the "corporatists" have skewed the system in their favor, and in so doing have, perhaps, inadvertently corrupted the prospects of future discovery.
In today's episode, our tech maven Ray Blanco gives us a concrete example: flu vaccines.
"We tend to think of influenza… as a common seasonal illness," he writes. But the flu kills and hospitalizes more than HIV and hepatitis C combined. The search for a better flu vaccine could potentially lead to a trailblazing discovery... and if you're an investor who understand the trends, the early research could mean a lot for your portfolio. Read on...
[Ed. Note: All week, you've told us the amount of money you'd need to live your dream retirement. The average answer was $4.5 million. How much of that do you have saved up so far? The average "near retirement" household only has $12,000 saved. That's a massive difference.
But as we mentioned yesterday, there's a hidden subniche of the market (Wall Street doesn't exploit it for a simple reason) that can allow you to reach your dream retirement number in just 30 days. We're calling it the 30-Day Retirement Plan.
We're looking for just 250 aggressive readers to beta-test this hidden subniche. We're calling it an "Open Call for the 30-Day Retirement Plan." The 250-person limit is strict. That means there's just one spot open for every 200 people reading The Daily Reckoning.
We can't guarantee you'll be one of the readers who'll get a spot, but if you hurry, you just might be. Click here to sign up now.]
| | | | | | | External Advertisement
Why you should look at "Line Item 12" of Michelle Obama's tax returns
Look at the astonishing numbers Michelle is posting to her tax returns. She's taking in more per month, on average, than most Americans make in a year. What's more, this lucrative income stream is sponsored by a completely PRIVATE source. | | | | | | | | The Daily Reckoning Presents
| | | | A Better Way to Fight the Flu | | | | by Ray Blanco | | | Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is reported to have once said, "The death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of millions is a statistic." Human psychology being what it is, we are shocked and appalled by the unusual, but we become habituated to what's common, even if it's something very bad.
In few places is this as true as in our reaction to disease. Something that regularly kills a great many people usually doesn't elicit much of an emotional response. One good example is influenza. We tend to think of influenza, also known as "the flu," as a common seasonal illness. Infecting up to one in five individuals during a typical year, it certainly qualifies as such. However, despite (or perhaps because of) the ubiquity of the influenza virus, it's easy to forget what a huge problem it is.
Even during an average year, the influenza virus, in all of its various types and strains, hospitalizes 200,000 and kills some 40,000 people in the U.S. That's a greater number than those generated by far more dreaded viruses like HIV and hepatitis C. In fact, influenza viruses kill more than HIV and hepatitis C combined.
Worldwide, influenza's death toll is even more shocking: It's a safe bet that about half a million people will die of flu infections this year. To give that number some perspective, it's more than the population of a major city like Miami... each and every year.
The economic toll is correspondingly large. Just in adults, influenza imposes an economic burden of $83 billion per year in the U.S.
Again, to give that number meaning, it's more than the annual budget for a large state like Florida.
What's worse about the cost of influenza is that these are typical yearly figures. These numbers aren't representative of pandemic years -- years when a particularly deadly and infectious strain of the virus breaks out. The cost in lives during those years can be far worse. The 1918 "Spanish flu" epidemic, for example, claimed upward of 50 million lives before it ran its course.
Influenza strains, even highly virulent ones, eventually peter out because our immune systems can adapt and defend us. Flu viruses, however, have a high mutation rate. New strains constantly emerge to which we haven't developed immunity.
Furthermore, influenza is present not only in humans, but also in other animals like birds and pigs. Sometimes, a virus can jump between species or combine its genes with a human-specific version, creating a deadly and highly infectious new variety.
If you've read the headlines lately, you know this could be happening right now. Thousands of dead pigs have been mysteriously appearing in Chinese rivers, and people in that part of the world have begun dying of new flu outbreaks.
But that's not all that's worrisome. Just as troublesome are news reports of Chinese researchers creating new "hybrid flus." These strains combine the genes of flu viruses present in several species. They could not only be transmittable to humans, but be highly deadly as well.
Although these Chinese virologists have been creating hybrid strains for benign reasons -- to anticipate and prepare for the prospect of man-to-man transmission of these threatening strains -- this might not always be the case in other places. Others could use the same methods to create deadly biological weapons. The danger of maliciously modified viruses is so great, in fact, that some experts consider it to be greater than the threat of nuclear terrorism.
Whether from natural or human causes, the next virus pandemic will, sooner or later, hit the globe. Fortunately, the science to counter these threats is maturing rapidly. Innovators are developing prophylactic and therapeutic biotechnology right now to address not only the risk of a deadly pandemic outbreak, but also the much-ignored, but still heavy toll of common seasonal influenza.
| | | | | | | "The Anguish on Bill Bonner's Face When I Told Him Was Horrifying…"
Find out the full story behind this quote in a special presentation you don't want to miss from Addison Wiggin, co-founder of The Daily Reckoning, when you CLICK HERE. | | | | | |
Back in the late 1700s, English physician Edward Jenner made one of the greatest medical discoveries of all time. In his study of smallpox, perhaps the most feared infectious disease of the period, he noticed milkmaids seldom contracted the disease.
Jenner knew that humans caught smallpox only once, and if they survived, remained immune for the rest of their lives. Investigating further, he came to believe that exposure to a cattle virus commonly afflicting dairy workers, cowpox, conferred resistance to the much deadlier smallpox virus. He hypothesized that the pox contracted from cattle was a weakened version of smallpox. Becoming infected by it, however, brought the same immunity benefit as the real thing -- without the same risk of death.
Jenner then did something considered unthinkable. He deliberately infected a young patient with pus harvested from individuals with cowpox blisters. Months later, he attempted to infect the patient with smallpox but could not. Repetitions of this experiment yielded the same results -- exposure to cowpox prevented smallpox infection.
Although medical ethics have evolved a great deal since Jenner's time, his discovery would change the way we dealt with smallpox and lead the way to the development of vaccines. By the late 1800s French chemist Louis Pasteur would begin to use weakened pathogens to create vaccines against anthrax and cholera. By the 20th century, Jonas Salk and others would extend vaccination technology to other infectious disease like polio and measles.
The discovery that human immunity could be deliberately improved, along with the technology to do it, changed the way we deal with infectious disease. Hundreds of millions of lives have been spared from the ravages of invisible pathogens -- including influenza.
Typically, strains believed to be the likeliest during flu season are identified months ahead of time. Then, the long process of growing viruses in chicken eggs and rendering them inert begins. By the beginning of flu season, doses of vaccine -- usually containing deactivated viruses for three strains -- are distributed. These vaccines present antigens associated with specific influenza strains. Once the immune system is exposed to them, it remembers and attacks live viruses with the same antigens.
But tailoring a vaccine for flu season requires a long lead time, and even our best predictions are often wrong. Dominant strains during a flu season are often not ones a vaccine is designed to prevent. Flu viruses are a fast-moving target, because they mutate frequently. This same disadvantage makes flu vaccines nearly useless in the face of a rapid outbreak of a new pandemic influenza virus. By the time a vaccine becomes available, millions of people could be infected.
Something better really is needed. We'll keep our eye out for investable companies moving virus vaccine technology forward.
Regards,
Ray Blanco
for The Daily Reckoning
[Ed Note. If you haven't seen Ray's latest research in the "Makers" space, it's potentially some of his most lucrative yet. Check it out here: Click. Print. Gun.]
| | | | | | |  Ray Blanco is co-editor of Technology Profits Confidential and contributes to Breakthrough Technology Alert and Tomorrow in Review. | | | | | | | | | BE SURE TO ADD dr@dailyreckoning.com to your address book.
| | | | | | | Additional Articles & Commentary:
| | | | | | | | | |
© 2013 Agora Financial, LLC. 808 Saint Paul Street, Baltimore MD 21202. A lthough our employees may answer your general customer service questions, they are not licensed under securities laws to address your particular investment situation. No communication by our employees to you should be deemed as personalized investment advice. 
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.