swine flu

I am sure that by now you heard about the Swine Flu that is raging in Mexico. I am not sure if raging is the right word since a mere 150 dead in a country like Mexico is barely above the noise. Not that I want to be callous about the loss of life, but, as some people have pointed out, this may be much ado about nothing.

It is interesting to note that this swine flu has already killed almost as many people as the much talked about bird flu of 2006/7/8. That flu did kill an enormous number of birds, but somehow the human toll never materialized. What also did not materialize was the much feared human to human transmission. This time it is different, since it is clear to all that the swine flu does transmit from human to human.

It does not transmit through eating pork and all the worries (and falling stock prices) about that sector are based on a misunderstanding of the disease. Maybe people are confused because in the earlier (bird) flu, contact with birds was strongly discouraged. But then again, not all diseases are identical. Maybe the public can be forgiven for not understanding these "subtleties."

Another reason why the swine flu has caught headlines (apart from the bird flu hangover, and the human to human transmission) is that we all know a pandemic flu is coming. Although we don't know where and when, we can be pretty sure -given the life cycle of flu pandemics- that we are in for a big one. A big one means one that kills tens of millions worldwide. Much like the big earthquake we are all waiting for in here in California, a major flu pandemic is a certainty.

Unlike what most people seem to believe, flu is a very deadly disease. It is not because we all suffer several bouts of flu during our life times, and recover swiftly and pretty much without sequelae in about 1-2 weeks, that we should think of flu as an innocent disease. It is up there with all the major killers that get a lot more coverage in the press.

Furthermore, a pandemic flu, like the one in 1918, is quite a bit more virulent than a "regular" flu. There are many reports of perfectly healthy young people who died within hours of developing symptoms. Some that survived the initial attack died several days later. Granted a large number of those died of bacterial superinfections -and we now have some remedies for those- but it would be ill-advised to be too cavalier about that. It may very well be that such a virulent flu followed by a bacterial lung infection is refractory to antibiotics (even if the bugs are not resistant). That is true because there is a difference between killing the micro-organism and ending the disease process. That too is something the public does not understand very well.