As important as terrorism is, Al-Qaeda has still managed to kill no more than 10,000 people worldwide in the past five years. An outbreak of bird flu, however, could kill tens of millions. The Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 killed 50 million people, or nearly 3% of the world's population at the time. If a pandemic of similar severity were to engulf the world today, it would spread much more quickly in this age of international air travel, and could wipe out most of the population of developing countries in the world, as well as cause an economic calamity more severe than the Great Depression.
However, scientists have now discovered how the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus replicates inside cells. While the virus will continue to mutate and attempt to outpace our efforts to develop effective drugs quickly, what is noteworthy is how far our technology has advanced. As recently as 1995, it would have taken several years to map the genome of a flu virus and dig out this information. Now, the same can be achieved in a matter of months, due to computers being 100 times more powerful than they were in 1996, and the productivity of this exponential improvement in computational power now diffusing pervasively throughout our scientific research infrastructure.
In the future, new pathogens will be decoded in even shorter times, hopefully at a rate faster than they can mutate.
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