Wednesday, May 13, 2009

"Nature is more complex than mathematical models."

Did you know that in this latest flu scare "China rounded up all the Mexican nationals they could find, put them in isolation, and then shipped them by plane back to Mexico?" The May 11 WSJ article by Gordon Crovitz added, "In Hong Kong quarantined foreign guests held a sign: "We will exchange information for beer and food and cigarettes."

Crovitz writes, "The uncertainty about the longer term effects of the current swine flu is a reminder that nature is more complex than mathematical models." No one ever seems to ask the "experts" to declare publicly the odds they assign to an epidemic. That is because, according to Crovitz, "epidemics are not predictable." He further states, "We also know that if health experts fully understood the causes of epidemics, they would know with certainty when to mandate vaccinations." And, what about the side effects of vaccinations versus the consequences of actually getting the flu?

On a related note, guess how many pigs there are in the world? Give up? One billion! Vietnam alone has 27 million. Those numbers are from another May 11 WSJ article by Nguyen Anh Thu and Scott Kilman.

1 comment:

Terri Wagner said...

I suspect that if we truly wanted too we could round up the illegals and return them. We just don't seem to want to loud enough for our gov't to hear us.