[generic92034]

You can see how differently human bodies are reacting to any known transmissible virus or bacterial disease. Some will die, some do not even notice they were infected. Are there any exceptions? Obviously there so far never was an easily transmissible disease killing everyone, or we would not be here. That is no guarantee for the future, but it makes claims of likely extinction events sound a bit too strong, IMHO.

[tonymillion]

Actually there are (Ebola, haemorrhagmific fever etc) are mostly deadly and easily transmissible - however they tend to be self limiting in part because they are so deadly and (luckily) because they aren’t airborne and thus distance … literally the distance between groups of people helps limit them. (Also the fairly short incubation period).

However all of that is irrelevant since the GP was musing on the “huge genetic diversity of humans” being a barrier to xenomutation of animal viruses to humans.

Thats not the case, because humans are pretty much genetically identical to near a 1000th of a percent - so a particularly virulent virus that mutated from an animal to a human because of an organ transplant has a pretty good chance of causing a major pandemic.

You don’t even have to take my word for it, Covid, swine flu, h1n1 are all examples of animal infections jumping - and that’s without the added long term exposure / selection pressure a transplanted organ would provide.

Caveat: I’m all for this kind of research and development given the lack of transplantable organs in many health departments, but I’m also in favor of r&d for artificial replacements too.

[generic92034]

No, in fact Ebola is not quite so deadly (from WP):

"It kills between 25% and 90% of those infected – about 50% on average."

Even if it was airborne and very infectious it would not render an extinction event. It could possibly destroy civilization, though.

> However all of that is irrelevant since the GP was musing on the “huge genetic diversity of humans” being a barrier to xenomutation of animal viruses to humans.

No, you misunderstood. This was only meant regarding the ability of any virus to cause an extinction event. This was not applied to crossing the human-animal barrier.