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The next flu pandemic - Virulent influenza strain threatens world, expert warns
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[link to www.canada.com]
June 13, 2005
OTTAWA -- The world is facing the threat of unprecedented "viral carnage" from an influenza pandemic and should immediately prepare for a catastrophe that would jeopardize global security and create economic devastation, says an international public health expert.
The warning is contained in the influential journal Foreign Affairs, which is publishing a special section on pandemics in its upcoming July/August issue.
Titled "The Next Pandemic," the section includes four articles by a panel of experts who examine the dire consequences if the H5N1 flu virus now in Asia evolves into a contagion that spreads throughout the world.
One of the articles is written by U.S. journalist Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the book The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance.
She notes that the H5N1 virus is highly unpredictable and scientists are frustrated because they canīt predict with certainty when, or even if, it will explode into a pandemic. But she writes that if the strain becomes easily transmissible among people and "maintains its extraordinary virulence, humanity could well face a pandemic unlike any ever witnessed."
In the U.S. alone, the Centers for Disease Control says a "medium-level epidemic" could kill up to 207,000 Americans, while Health Canada says anywhere from 11,000 to 58,000 Canadians could die. "The entire world would experience similar levels of viral carnage, and those areas ravaged by HIV and home to millions of immuno-compromised individuals might witness even greater death tolls," writes Garrett.
"In response, some countries might impose useless but highly disruptive quarantines or close borders and airports, perhaps for months. Such closures would disrupt trade, travel and productivity. No doubt the worldīs stock markets would teeter and perhaps fall precipitously.
Aside from economics, the disease would likely directly affect global security, reducing troop strength and capacity for all armed forces, UN peacekeeping operations, and police worldwide."
Garrett writes because the worldīs wealth is concentrated in fewer than a dozen nations representing a "distinct minority" of the planetīs population, the capacity to respond to a pandemic is severely imbalanced.
"The majority of the worldīs governments not only lack sufficient funds to respond to a superflu; they also have no health infrastructure to handle the burdens of disease, social disruption, and panic. The international community would look to the United States, Canada, Japan, and Europe for answers, vaccines, cures, cash, and hope. How these wealthy governments responded, and how radically the death rates differed along worldwide fault lines of poverty, would resonate for years thereafter."
Foreign Affairs is a respected journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent group based in New York that fosters public policy discussion. Itīs the second major journal in less than three weeks to publish a special section on the flu pandemic. The British journal Nature published 10 articles on the subject in its May 26 issue.
The articles come in the wake of recent warnings by senior officials at the World Health Organization that they are increasingly worried the planet is unprepared for a pandemic. In late May, WHO director-general Dr. Lee Jong-Wook told a special meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva that the bird flu is "the most serious known health threat the world is facing today."
"This is a grave danger for all people in all countries," he said, drawing comparison to the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 which killed between 20 million and 50 million people.
The new H5N1 strain has killed millions of birds in Asia and crossed the species barrier to infect humans. So far, 100 humans in three countries -- Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia -- are known to have been infected, and 54 of those have died. Experts fear it is slowly mutating and could easily be transformed into a flu which is easily transmissible between humans.
Last Friday, a top WHO official added to those warnings at a news conference in Beijing -- revealing that the flu virus is evolving quickly and the strain which has spread to China appears to have increased in virulence.
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