Scare of the Day

Tuesday is "Health/Science" day in the Times and the Boston Globe, and there's always something there to keep you up at night. This week the CDC is putting us all on Orange Alert for the next killer flue pandemic.

Now, I'm not by any means downplaying this problem. It probably will happen that a particularly virulent strain of flue will emerge fairly soon. But like most public health problems, this is far more of a threat to the poor countries than to the rich ones. Thanks to vaccine and improved health care infrastructure, we probably won't experience anything like the fatality rate we did from the 1918 epidemic. A severe flu epidemic would strain health care resources and would be a notable event for us, but it would be far more devastating elsewhere.

The World Health Organization has a very good page packed with info about the influenza threat and the surveillance and response infrastructure it has established. Folks who want to get the straight dope on this should check it out.

WHO Influenza Pandemic Preparedness page

Excerpt: In the past, new strains have generated pandemics causing high death rates and great social disruption. In the 20th century, the greatest influenza pandemic occurred in 1918 -1919 and caused an estimated 40–50 million deaths world wide. Although health care has improved in the last decades, epidemiological models from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, USA project that today a pandemic is likely to result in 2 to 7.4 million deaths globally. In high income countries alone, accounting for 15% of the worlds population, models project a demand for 134–233 million outpatient visits and 1.5–5.2 million hospital admissions. However, the impact of the next pandemic is likely to be the greatest in low income countries because of different population characteristics and the already strained health care resources.