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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 6114650" data-attributes="member: 19675">You'd like this to be true, but it isnt.  Too many people these days are scared of losing their jobs, or are hoarding/have used up their sick leave to actually miss work even while seriously ill.My father (an MD) has treated people who walked into his office while becoming cyanotic.I didn't just pluck that 50% exposure/infection rate via aerial transmission out of the air (no pun intended)- that's an estimate that shows up in some of the WHO reports, as well as the CDC and other literature.  My Dad is an MD specializing in allergies, which requires a foundation in the study of infectious diseases: he has a special hate on for the Flu- mainly because people take it so lightly- so I've been hearing & reading all this stuff he gets for decades.Again, exposure/infection does not mean you get sick.  It does, however, still mean you can be a vector.  In fact, you can be nearly asymptomatic and still be quite contagious, making you a carrier.So if Killer Flu Patient Zero takes a flight and exposes 20 people (less than 50% of the plane's passengers), with only half of those getting sick enough to be a vector, and of those, only 2 get super sick.  He gets off that plane and takes another to reach his destination, with similar results.  We have 20 people spreading the disease, 4 of whom are deathly ill, right?Not so fast: since the Flu is a hardy bug, and planes don't get cleaned all that thoroughly nor that often.  Those 2 planes will harbor some of Patient Zero's plague for a few days, opening up further vectoring. Final tally of vectors?  WHO knows, I don't.That's 'cause the Flu is pretty slutty as pathogens go, and most of the time when it jumps species, the newly infected don't have the same kind of reaction as the carrier species.  (More or less is, AFAIK, not predictable, hence part of the reason swine and avian flus are soooooo scary.)  But even so, "commonly" is a relative term.  Despite having common origins, only one or two of the last few avian flu outbreaks mutated enough to be transmitted from human to human as opposed to from avian to human with direct contact.  (Side note: this year's avian flu looks nasty, since the infected animals appear to be largely asymptomatic...)I did mention the Plague & weaponized anthrax (bacteria) and rice blast (fungi) in passing, but the flu and smallpox are in some ways scarier because of our relative inability to use preventative countermeasures against them.  While toxins like botulin or ricin are effective, things like that wouldn't serve the purpose i postulated- namely, defeating the foe in a way that allows easy post-conquest cleanup.And who knows about what could be done with prions?But the fact is, the reason I'm focused on the flu, etc. is because I am not a xenobiologist.  The Flu is just my catch-all stand in for whatever nasty pathogen(s) might be found in the alien ecosystem.  If, for instance, the aliens were sentient "plants", a "fungus" might be the only way to go.</blockquote>

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