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Curzon
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Curzon

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April 27th, 2009

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Why you should fear Swine Flu

This is a near complete repost of my 2005 post Why you should fear Avian Flu.

The last deadly flu epidemic broke out almost 90 years ago in 1918. How quickly did the flu spread? From PBS.org comes this map that shows how the virus spread across the United States in just two weeks.

At the time, the United States had an excellent rail system that assisted the spread across the country. Transcontinental travel was limited to boats, and it took weeks to cross the Atlantic. But these are ancient forms of transportation when compared to the speed and efficiency of interstate highways and air travel that we enjoy today. And the capacity is significantly greater as well. In an age when you can fly from London to Lagos or New York to New Dehli within a day, the swine flu will spread like nothing seen before in human history if it connects from human to human.

In retrospect, it appears that the Avian flu was controlled because it never passed from human to human. We can hope the same stays true for swine flu, but from the epicenter in Mexico City we’re already seeing cases emerge in Texas, California, Kansas, and possibly New York. As with SARS and the avian flu scare of 4 years ago, the WHO and world governments are acting as quickly as possible to prevent its spread. But as the map above shows, if the flu does begin to expand across the map like wildfire, there may be nothing that anyone can do to stop it.

Comments to this entry

Por qué debes temer a la gripe porcina [ENG]
April 27, 2009
7:33 am
[...] Por qué debes temer a la gripe porcina [ENG]cominganarchy.com/2009/04/27/why-you-should-fear-swine-flu/ por maxklein hace pocos segundos [...]
Dan
April 27, 2009
3:09 pm
So...you just repost the same article and swap out the name of the disease? Neat..."The (fill in name) is a disease that could kill everyone. If we dont stop the (fill in name) then the world will collapse in a pile of fail."
feeblemind
April 27, 2009
3:20 pm
Thanks for posting the 1918 map. It is interesting.
disc
April 27, 2009
7:32 pm
fear everything. chicks dig cowards
Alfred Russel Wallace
April 28, 2009
2:09 am
Dan - Flu IS flu.... I agree with Feeblemind - we need the reminder....
Eoin Purcell
April 28, 2009
8:43 am
While I tend to agree with you about the need to be conscious of these past events (and thus inform our current decisions) on this topic I think you perhaps play to the gallery of fear a little!

In many ways the fact that the Avian flu failed to become a pandemic has set in place a number of serious benefits:

1) A large stockpile of anti-viral drugs in many countries and a large capacity to produce more.
2) A clear policy at a global level for identifying, informing and alerting authorities and medical personnel of such outbreaks.
3) Local level emergency action plans that imagine the dangers and problems of operating hospitals and other emergency services with a 25-50% staff loss through illness.
4) Increased public awareness of the need to follow medical advice and the potential impact such pandemics could have.

That is to name but four of the many positives the recent history of avian/swine flu have endowed us with! So yes, we ought to fear the outbreak of a virulent pandemic but we should equally look at how these intermittent fears pre-arm us to face them!
Eoin
Abe
April 28, 2009
12:35 pm
The thing most people dont realise is that there are NO drugs to fight viruses like anti-biotics fight infections.

2 completely different animals. There are currently ZERO drugs that attack viruses. Anti-Virals only help boost the immune system so that your own body can fight back. Unfortunately, viruses all behave differently in each individual, and they attack the cell itself, in many cases rewriting the DNA.

The only hope we have to fight an epidemic is 1- quarantine, and 2- luck. The virus can mutate enough from generation to generation that it's efficiency degrades with every jump.

I think the government acted correctly, because in cases like this, FEAR IS a good tool to get people volunteering to stay away from each other until the pandemic burns itself out.

Fort Detrick and the CDC have run many excersises for exactly this, and the lethality of the virus coupled with it's generation integrity are the 2 main factors that determine how the pandemic runs. Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do besides quarantine.
Thomas
April 28, 2009
12:53 pm
To be simply contrarian, in 1918 the public didn't understand germ theory. We didn't have a multi-billion dollar cleaning products industry. We didn't have anti-viral drugs or any of the trappings of modern medicine. Though we did have a rail network, most travel was still undertaken by foot or horseback so a nationwide suspension of travel was impossible. In the cities of 1918, people lived in denser communities with Victorian era sanitation.

I'm not suggesting that a major flu outbreak would be a cakewalk. What I am saying is that the world is a much different place than it was a century ago.
Curzon
April 29, 2009
4:31 am
Thomas, that is a good point, but as a contrarian view to the contrarian view, consider -- back in 1918, it was so much easier to manage a quarantine. A community could be easily isolated, transportation routes could be cut off and movement of people was slow. It may be possible that the spread of the flu is already inevitable -- this Mexico-originating virus has now been reported in Kansas, Australia, Spain, and elsewhere, from where it may already have spread elsewhere.

Or, fears could be overblown, or countermeasures are effective, and it all blows over.
Joe
April 29, 2009
11:43 pm
Alfred .. the comment Flu IS Flu is correct but a bit simplistic. The majority here would only recognize Influenza as the cause of the flu ... for which we have the "flu shot". Influenze is an orthomyxovirus which also includes what we are talking about now ... the swine flu.

ABE you are absolutely incorrect when you say that anti-virals only boost the immune system. The anti-viral Tamiflu blocks neuramidase confining the virus and preventing its spread. Thus allowing the body's NORMAL immune system to kill it off and eliminate. Valtrex is a similar medication used to treat the herpes virus in genital herpes and in the form of herpes zoster (shingles). It blocks replication of the virus and limits outbreaks but does nothing to boost the immune system. The only medication I use as an immune modulator or up-regulator of the immune system is Aldara or Imiquimod used to treat superficial skin cancers, molluscum and genital warts.

All in all, I think it's good to remind us all to wash our hands and stay in generally good health (exercise and eat well) and our chance of being significantly impacted by this outbreak is low.

BTW ... the FLU PANDEMIC of 1918 as referenced above IS THE EXACT SAME ORTHOMYXOVIRUS causing the swine flu of today. So, it is NOT (INSERT ILLNESS HERE) but very interesting how quickly this virus has been known to spread ... hence the warnings we all are hearing.
xxxxxxx
April 30, 2009
8:03 pm
Since the new strain has three elements, including bird, swine and human, it sounds like something that people created and distributed south of the border to help control the drug cartel wars, only it got a "little" out of hand.
CDC
May 1, 2009
1:41 am
"To be simply contrarian, in 1918 the public didn't understand germ theory. We didn't have a multi-billion dollar cleaning products industry. We didn't have anti-viral drugs or any of the trappings of modern medicine"

1. 20% of cases so far have shown to be resistant to anti-virals.
2. Virus not equal Germ.
3. Modern medical systems are not designed to handle infections in the scale of 1000's let alone millions. During SARS one of the biggest methods of transmission was ill people who did not have SARS going to hospitals packed with people who did...
ComingAnarchy.com » Why you shouldn’t fear swine flu
May 4, 2009
8:57 pm
[...] – Email this Cartoon Despite this post’s title, it is not meant to contradict Curzon’s recent post detailing the inherent danger of airborne pathogens in an age when a person can conceivably travel [...]