Swine Flu – Are We Facing a Pandemic?

The world health organization (WHO) has already declared the current outbreak of ‘flu’ as a pandemic in June. So it has gotten much attention it deserves to contain it from countries across the world. It has already reported from many countries around the world.

Influenza virus has killed millions of people during the last century. The major pandemic of ‘Spanish flu’ in 1918 was estimated to have killed over 50 million people. Although the current outbreak has affected millions of people around the world and will affect millions more, my prediction is that it will not be as deadly as previous outbreaks, based to available data so far. It will definitely increase in the coming months, especially in many developing countries not affected so far. Number of cases will also shoot up in the ‘flu season’ with the climate favoring the disease.

An ‘epidemic’ is the spread of an infectious disease, usually localized in an area and called ‘endemic’. While the epidemic occurring on a world wide scale is a ‘pandemic’. Historically there have been many pandemics such as small pox, tuberculosis, flu, and HIV recently. With the increased travel across the world in modern times it is predicted that there is higher chance of spreading a disease quickly across the globe creating a pandemic.

Influenza is one of the common viral infections recurring every year, may be only next to common cold. This virus has the ability to change quickly and appear has new variant every so often. For example the current H1N1 variant, commonly called ‘Swine flu’, originated in Mexico early this year, is an assortment of an endemic human strain, an endemic avian (bird) strain and 2 swine flu virus strains. Our immune system is very good at identifying new and emerging virus and contains them most of the time. But once in a while they may have developed enough variation to escape immune surveillance to cause disease. In such circumstances they can quickly spread through the population.

Public education is the major key to controlling the spread of disease, especially in third world countries. Proper hygiene and plans to isolate infected individuals should be done at city or state level. Anti-virals such as Tamiflu and Relenza effective against Influenza should be stock piled and made available to individuals already infected with the virus. Development of a vaccine is if often time consuming and may not be available at the time of urgent need, when the disease spreading.