If you aren’t concerned about the possibility at least that there could be an influenza epidemic, you haven’t read enough about 1918.
3 thoughts on “Influenza”
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If you aren’t concerned about the possibility at least that there could be an influenza epidemic, you haven’t read enough about 1918.
Comments are closed.
This might just be the big one. 1918 came to mind for me, as well. Fortunately, the Bird Flu and West Nile didn’t turn out to be pandemics. But this one seems to showing up a lot of places in rapid succession.
You can read Orwell’s Animal Farm. I think I’m going to take another look at Stephen King’s The Stand.
It may be more practical however to keep an eye on http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/ for a very concerned, but rational point of view.
The World Health Organization offers the following:
The Committee considered available data on confirmed outbreaks of A/H1N1 swine influenza in the United States of America, Mexico, and Canada. The Committee also considered reports of possible spread to additional countries.
On the advice of the Committee, the WHO Director-General decided on the following.
The Director-General has raised the level of influenza pandemic alert from the current phase 3 to phase 4.
The change to a higher phase of pandemic alert indicates that the likelihood of a pandemic has increased, but not that a pandemic is inevitable.
As further information becomes available, WHO may decide to either revert to phase 3 or raise the level of alert to another phase.
This decision was based primarily on epidemiological data demonstrating human-to-human transmission and the ability of the virus to cause community-level outbreaks.
Given the widespread presence of the virus, the Director-General considered that containment of the outbreak is not feasible. The current focus should be on mitigation measures.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2009/h1n1_20090427/en/index.html
While I’m not disagreeing, thankfully we have a few more weapons in our arsenal than we did in 1918.
Tamiflu for one.
There are any number of substantive differences between 2009 and 1918 – like today we actually know what a virus is.
And tamiflu (to name but one) actually works.
And there IS a CDC, cross border coordination, WHO, knowledge, modern communications, more modern medical practices available to WAY more people, we didn’t spend three years incubating it in the barracks and trenches and then turn it loose on the population by shipping cultures (sons) to every family in America.
I wish it would just make many people ill, swamp the hospitals, and force Congress to address the over 50% of people not covered by health insurance. I heard a number out of the Mass. experiment that is showing modern medicine can be covered through the insurers at roughly $350/person/month.
Not bad for an industry that used to be outlawed – now in less than a century, they have gotten the government to mandate that I send them auto, the mortgage industry to mandate I send them house, my landlord to try to mandate I send them renters, and now my government to mandate I send them health.