Achoo!

In the flu seasons of my youth my parents occasionally would recall the Flu Epidemic of 1918, which they lived through and which killed perhaps as many as 50 million people. It also debilitated many times more people for a week or more. We’ve been lucky here in the US as such an epidemic has not been repeated. Will our lucky streak continue?

Unless we do something, our luck will run out, according to acknowledged experts in influenza. The current issue of Nature warns that the avian flu that is currently moving through Southeast Asia has the potential to exceed the damage of the 1918 flu and could affect 20% of the world’s population. The scientists estimate that 60% of those hospitalized by the avian flu will die.

The damage would, according to the head of University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, be more than death and illness. He writes that the flu could, “change the world overnight...reducing or even ending foreign travel and trade”. And, if trade and travel are curtailed, the ability to transport vaccines and other medical supplies is also curtailed.

The writers call for a global task force to attack the problem. If the comments of Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, are listened to, something may actually be done in time. Fauci said, “Unless we improve our capacity to produce such countermeasures, we may experience again the devastation of past pandemics.” Of course, our outsourcing the production of last year’s flu vaccine to England should give one cause to worry whether we’ll make the necessary effort as well as do something we seldom do – cooperate with other nations.