THE PROBLEM WITH NEW (NOVEL) VIRUSES [thread]

"... is this absolutely phenomenal disruption of the immune system that is the key to why people die of this virus. And I would just add - we saw the same thing with SARS. So what's going on here is your body says, your immune system

sends out all its sentinels and says, "I don't know what the heck this is. We've never seen anything even remotely like this before. It won't do any good to bring in the sharpshooters because those antibodies aren't here. And it won't do any good to bring in the tanks and

all our artillery because those T-cells don't recognize it either. So we're going to have to go all-out thermonuclear response, stimulate the total cytokine cascade. The whole immune system swarms into the lungs and, yes, they die, drowning in their own fluids, of pneumonia. But

it's not bacterial pneumonia and it's not a pneumonia that would respond to a vaccine."

Laurie Garrett, author of "The Coming Plague"
2007 TEDtalk: What can we learn from the 1918 flu?