A friend of mine made a comment about the swine flu scare being crazy and overblown. I replied that you never know, it could turn out to be serious. Apparently, I have insulted my friend and I he believes I should be wearing a tin foil hat because I'm that crazy.
My point is that you can't tell in the early stages of some types of situations that it's going to be a crisis. You don't know when you're in a drought, a depression, a serious wildfire, or a pandemic when it starts - in the early stages. You don't know if it can be defined as such until it develops to its full potential. Yet that's the best time to fight any of these problems.
Many people are scorning the attention to the flu in Mexico. I work with a nurse that was indignantly telling me that a 1918 pandemic couldn't happen today because we are too well prepared and much more knowledgable. She's only right if we do take emerging pandemic threats seriously early on. It's a strange paradox. People that say we've got the situation under control and are telling us not to react when the reaction is what keeps the situation under control. Before anyone compares this to our reaction to terrorism, I would emphasize that the reaction has to be measured, effective, precise, and targeted, which is not what our reaction to terrorism was. Plus, terrorism is not a pandemic, it's a small group of people that commit acts and are then too spent to immediately go on to the next attack.
I saw a preliminary report that said that 1700 people in Mexico caught this new strain of flu and 100 people died. That's over 5% which is as bad as the 1918 pandemic. If this flu erupts in a similar fashion to the 1918 pandemic, and 20% of the population came down with it and 5% of them died, that's 1% of the population or 3 million people in the U.S. That 1000 times as bad as 9/11 and look at all the money and political reaction we spent on that. [Note inserted later: many of those early reported deaths were later found not to be the emerging Swine Flu strain.]
Some people say that there are more people killed in cars than by the flu, but that's not right. There are about 36,000 people killed in the U.S. each year by the flu and around 40,000 by auto accidents. So a pandemic would be about 80 times worse than a normal year's flu or car accident deaths. The annual flu death rate is 12 times worse than 9/11.
Imagine 60 million dying worldwide. The impact of that would not be trivial. In my mind, we need to be spending more on science to help with preparedness against emerging pandemics. We do not yet have a quick way to manufacture flu vaccine, only a slow method involving hundreds of thousands of chicken eggs. We need to be able to get the genetic sequence of the disease and be able to crank out truckloads of vaccine extremely quickly. This would take technology we do not now possess and capital we are reluctant to spend on health.
We hear a little bit of panic each year about a pandemic. It was SARS and Avian flu in the last few years, and then there was a cluster of deaths in Colorado of regular flu last year. For each one of those examples, someone was reporting "this could be the big one". We've learned to discount these warnings. However, given that there isn't much we can do to prevent a pandemic once it spreads, it is important to jump on potential epidemics early in order to prevent them from being lethal pandemics. This is one warning you can't ignore.
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