Re: West Nile Skeeters?
The true rate of spread has to do with the carrier and how infectious it is. To start off with birds do not know state lines let alone national borders and one that was bitten and infected can be 1000s of miles away from home in a few days. On top of that the carrier a skitter can infect every animal it bites. For the sake of clarity I intend to use Humans as the infected and the carrier is a Skitter. Lets say a skitter lives 10 days and it can bite 100 people in that time frame. If you think about it potentialy if the infected(grannddad) gets bitten it means we have one carrier. The one carrier could infect at least 100. Now you have 100 infected people that each get bitten by skitters. You then have 100 carriers. Now each of the 100 carriers infect 100 people. You now have 10,000 people. Each of the 10,000 get bitten by a diffrent skitter. We now have 10,000 carriers. Each of the 10,000 carriers infect 100 people. We now have 1,000,000 new cases. All of this only took 3 10 day cycles which is 30 days. So we have a total of 1,010,001 cases of the disease in a month. If we have just one more cycle the world's population could end because it would be 1,000,000 times 1,000,000 which ends up in the trillions I believe which is over the worlds population of around 5 billion give or take. <br />Now I know a lot of folks will say BS to this but if you look at the potential infection rates for a lot of diseases you will see the same rapid growth. The easiest ones to find are HIV/AIDS. They say one person can literally have infected 100 or more people before the symptoms even show. Infectious diseases are dangerous and those that are deadly extreemly so. Biological warfare is the worst possible type of warefare and the easiest to perform. It only takes a little to kill a lot.<br />Personally I feel this disease is one that naturally spread like the bubonic plague or smallpox did long ago. It needed no help and there is no force other than nature behind it.