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Who’s afraid of swine flu?
Over the past six years, the world has been living on the brink of not one but three brand new pandemics: SARS that peaked in 2003, avian influenza in 2005 and 2006, and swine flu in 2009. Sanchita Sharma elaborates.
Over the past six years, the world has been living on the brink of not one but three brand new pandemics: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that peaked in 2003, avian influenza in 2005 and 2006, and swine flu in 2009.
That’s not counting HIV that causes AIDS, which has also been given pandemic status by World Health Organisation (WHO) in several of its reports.
WHO’s current pet worry: swine flu, lately renamed influenza A (H1N1) under protests from pig farmers, is apparently a brand new disease against which humans have no natural immunity. As this new virus has started spreading from person-to-person, instead of from animals to humans, and may continue to mutate, it would continue to infect millions and become harder to contain.
One sneeze can infect dozens who in turn infect hundreds and thousands, triggering a pandemic within days, says the global infectious diseases watchdog. It has the potential to cause a pandemic like the Hong Kong flu of 1968, which killed one million people worldwide. Or even a Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 that killed 100 million people.
The numbers are scary all right, more so when you consider that all it takes to kill are symptoms of fever, lethargy, runny nose and a sore throat. But before you cancel vacation plans, go through another set of figures, again from the WHO.
Viruses jumping from animals to humans is not a new phenomenon. According to the WHO, as many as 75 per cent infectious diseases that have infected humans over the past 30 years have originated from animals (zoonoses).
Among those thriving among humans are influenza A from wild birds, HIV from chimpanzees, plague from rodents, hepatitis B from apes, malaria from macaques and dengue from primates.
On average, one new disease has emerged every year over the past 20 years, mainly in Africa and Asia, and the WHO is fond of saying that any one of them may become a pandemic.
So far, none have.
Bird flu (H5N1) was first detected in South Korea in 2003, within months of SARS being contained. It immediately sparked fears it could mutate and become a pandemic killing millions worldwide. Till last month, the total number of human infections worldwide was 421, with 257 deaths.
SARS was more deadly to humans. It infected 8,096 people and killed 774 of them between November 2002 and July 2003.
But going by WHO data, you are more likely to die of the common flu than an exotic new disease. Seasonal flu, caused by the ubiquitous influenza viruses that give us fever, sore throat, cold and bodyache more than once a year, kills between 250,000 and 500,000. That is about 20 times more people in a month than the total deaths caused by bird flu and SARS combined.
That is not to say you’ll be in the pink of health if you spend your days surrounded by coughing and sneezing patients in an infectious diseases hospital in Mexico.
However, don’t let the pandemic alerts scare you too much. “Even if you control avian flu, the next one is coming.” This prophetic statement, made in September 2003 by Dr Shigeru Omi, WHO’s regional director for the Western Pacific, sums up the world’s situation today: you cannot live in a sterile bubble. If you escape one outbreak, there’s always something else around the corner.
So if things don’t spin out of control over the next week, a holiday abroad will be well worth the risk.
