Chekhov's Mistress
Preparing for the Next Pandemic
I was going to post something on this last summer, but I thought it too depressing and it doesn’t have anything to do with literature. Still this piece from Foreign Affairs magazine (the Paris Review of foreign policy journals) is provocative and probably where some of the journalists now reporting on it are getting their fodder (at least the authors if not the pieces themselves).
The July/August journal was mostly devoted to this issue, but this piece available on-line gives a good overview:
Recent clinical, epidemiological, and laboratory evidence suggests that the impact of a pandemic caused by the current H5N1 strain would be similar to that of the 1918-19 pandemic. More than half of the people killed in that pandemic were 18 to 40 years old and largely healthy. If 1918-19 mortality data are extrapolated to the current U.S. population, 1.7 million people could die, half of them between the ages of 18 and 40. Globally, those same estimates yield 180-360 million deaths, more than five times the cumulative number of documented AIDS deaths. In 1918-19, most deaths were caused by a virus-induced response of the victim’s immune system—a cytokine storm—which led to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In other words, in the process of fighting the disease, a person’s immune system severely damaged the lungs, resulting in death.
One can only hope that somebody tells bush that H5N1 is a terrorist group so that he might take action.
comments
There’s some big meeting on the 29th of this month - for Indonesia (yup, on my doorstep), this may be too late. It seems to have gone on the backburner in Australian news because we have some Australian drug trials in Bali at the moment.
However the Romanians are doing the right thing and culling their poultry.
– genevieve (10/17 at 04:49 AM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: October 12, 2005
- Filed Under:
Dismal/Dismaler: Econ/Politics
- Comments:1
- Links to this Post: Technorati
