AP Photo/ Andy Wong
It was always fairly likely that swine flu would become pandemic but now it's official as the World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that the geographic spread of the disease is such that its further spread cannot be stopped.
We've known for decades that one or other version of flu would create a global infection as it did in 1918 and also in 1968: that latter killed some 1 million people while the earlier one killed more than the entirety of World War One. The reason for the certainty is that the various strains of influenza mutate rapidly and we have no cure for any viral disease at all. We might have vaccines for some of them, those that do not mutate rapidly, but for those that do such vaccines will be only partially effective at stopping the spread.
The declaration that swine flu is now pandemic does not mean that it has become more dangerous: the ratio of deaths to infections actually seems to be lower at the moment than the normal flu outbreaks which occur in every country in winter. Rather, pandemic means that it is widely geographically dispersed. This has important public health implications for how we deal with it. If it is (as indeed it is said it is) present in 74 countries, then there's no point in restricting international travel to stop its spread. It's already here, wherever you happen to be calling "here".
It is possible to argue about the meaning of the word "epidemic": literally, the definition is that a disease is occurring more often than expected in a given population. This is true of swine flu, but another way of looking at it is whether swine flu is more prevalent than regular influenza: which it isn't, as yet. Last week's numbers from the WHO were that there had been some 90,000 identified cases and 429 deaths.
Comparing these numbers with normal influenza, which millions upon millions get every year, and which has a usual mortality rate of 1-2% of those infected, it is probably correct to say that swine flu is pandemic but not yet epidemic nor is it, by comparison, particularly fatal.
Comments
The mortality rate for normal flu is only about .1%, not 1%.
The WHO declared the H1N1 virus a Pandemic on June 11th. You can verify this at the WHO website. That was 5 weeks ago, why is this article news? Is your internet broken? Hey, newsflash, first black man elected president of USA! ??
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