The ET Flu

Let's say ET comes from far far away and brings with them a flu bug. I think there is a movie on this topic.
We might be immune or we might history. Gov. is paranoid enough with the bird flu and such.
Perhaps Mr. ET is in quarentine.

war of the worlds was the opposite. they came, they conquered, they exited their craft and dropped dead from the common cold.

Wouldn't any species from a unique enviroment bring some sort of germs into another enviroment?

This is one of the things I've wondered about - would an alien microbe be able to infect us, if our biochemistry & cell structure were completely different from its experience? It's like a PC computer virus trying to infect a Mac - we're not compatible, right?

I think the nature of an infection is more of the invasion of the body by the microbes. There is no element of "compatability" necessarily beyond, I think, the body having the nutrients that the microbe needs. We may have, for example, proteins or even molecules as small as base elements that the microbe might be able to extract from us. And our immune system would have very little protection against it.

Remember that the physical effects of the flu are not directly related to the microbe, but more often the body's response. The flu virus doesn't give you a fever, your body's response is to get hotter to try and kill the virus. And it is possible that you could feel the effects of the body's war against a virus even when the virus is relatively harmless, much like people getting flu symptoms when they have a shot.

Don't know if it would be able to infect us or not, germs and viruses are pretty crafty. But any germ carried by an alien from an alien enviroment would be new to our species.

There are a couple of issues here. First, is it reasonable to think that a culture capable of developing transportation and all the other sophisticated technologies necessary to travel immense distances be unaware of the disease threat? Unlikey.

Thre is most definitely a 'compatibility' issue. Viruses and other sub-bacterial organisms are specifically structured around specific protein molecules. This is why --- for the most part --- animal and plant diseases cannot be contracted by humans (and visa versa). That's not to say ET doesn't have a new, completely unknown organism.

Perhaps its we who are the "unclean ones"!
The possibilityu exists that all the abductions ,mutilations are aimed at developing ALIEN IMMUNE systems to some very invasive Earth germs or viruses.
This world may be a cess pool to them.......
Perhaps they will make contact after bthey re sure we wont make them sick..........or regress them in some psychological way from telepathic contamination?

There's a really good book you might be interested in- T he Andromeda Strain. It's the book that made Michael Crichton famous. Also a movie but the book's much better.

Not so much intelligent aliens with the flu. A satellite comes back to Earth contaminated with an alien microbe. Good stuff.

A virus can often be species dependent and works by hijacking existing biochemical processes.

These would be difficult to transmit across species of widely varying biology.

A bacterium or other parasite however, could be quite different as they are more biologically self-contained. Still often their *ecology* depends on a specific kind of host, but not always.