By Thursday evening, we'll be in first official flu pandemic in 41 years
Scott McPherson
in Politics and government, influenza and infectious diseases
|
2 Comments
WHO set to declare Phase Six at emergency meeting in Geneva.
Finally. Tomorrow, Thursday, June 11, 2009, the World Health Organization is expected to relent and finally declare what the world already knows; namely, that we are in the beginning of the first honest-to-God flu pandemic since the 1968 Hong Kong H3N2 influenza pandemic.
Dr. Margaret Chan, the head of the WHO, has been working with nations to make sure a move to Phase Six does not create some sort of bureaucratic nightmare. Also, there has been concern that a move to officially declare a pandemic would provoke some sort of panic.
I think the WHO is seriously underestimating the ability of the world's population to filter that news and absorb it quietly, without panic and without fanfare. The world already suspects that we are in panflu status; telling them they are correct will do far more to reassure people there is no coverup going on than to maintain a Phase Five status that is clearly obsolete.
There have been numerous articles regarding the collective inability of the world's animal health and public health professionals to look for the obvious (hogs) when doing their disease surveillance, and instead become preoccupied with avian flu that is still a threat, just not THE threat right now.
And that is very much a mystery, as we all go back to our Powerpoints and update them feverishly for swine flu. While updating one of my roughly one thousand Powerpoints on the topic, I couldn't help but notice that one slide showed a hog as plain as day, sitting in some Oriental mud puddle, with a chart explaining how pigs are the proverbial "mixing vessel" for flus.
If we always mention the pig, then why were we not looking at them more closely? because we were spending more time swabbing dusk and tern behinds in the Alaskan tundra than we were swabbing hog nostrils in Wisconsin and Mexico.
I mention Wisconsin because that state has been a veritable incubator of swine flu. At last count, some 2,200 cases of human swine H1 infection were reported to the CDC. This outpaces California, Texas, Illinois, New York and Florida.
What is fascinating is when you look back at the dispersion of the 1946-49 maybe-pandemic of H1N1. the first big area to be impacted by that epidemic was: The western and central Great Lakes states. That would include Wisconsin and Illinois. If you add up their swine H1 exposure, those two states account for nearly one-third of all US confirmed swine H1 cases. One-third. And the last time I looked, neither state borders Mexico, previously considered to be Ground Zero in all this.
I say "previously considered" because someone needs to formulate a theory as to why Wisconsin is the nation's swine flu capital, while not producing a single human death (so far) from the virus. Why is 2009's flu pattern mimicking that of 1946-48's? Somebody get a study going on that one, pronto.
I'll have more on that later. For now, rest assured that by evening drive tomorrow, and thus on the network news shows, we will be at Phase Six. And Americans, at least, will go on about their business.
Reader Comments (2)
Why is Wisconsin the nation's swine flu capital?
Must be the cheese. Not vitamin D fortified.
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
It may also be partly due to different testing practices. I think some of the areas with the most cases stopped looking hard before Wisconsin did. New York, in particular, seems to be missing a huge proportion of their actual cases. I suspect Wisconsin is up there, but not the nation's swine flu capital (New York and Texas, for instance, probably have more). As for Illinois, I imagine Chicago has had a lot of cases for much the same reason NYC has.
FYI, Wisconsin has had one swine flu death, but it's still behind some other states. I still suspect that Wisconsin is reporting a higher percentage of its cases than other swine flu hot spots, though other explanations are possible.