Cosmin Ghiurau

I had a majestic weekend and was oblivious to what was happening in our world. Sometimes that’s a good thing.

In any case, as we all know the past couple of days the news and media have been all over this ‘swine flu’ epidemic. Though usually these things rarely come close to ‘home’. It seems like this flu is more serious than others. I heard on the way to the office that Ohio has had a reported case of the swine flu. That IS close.

So to help myself out and others interested, I ran across an informative article on Yahoo with the 5 things to know about the swine flu.

Here they are: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090427/hl_time/08599189402900

1. Is this a flu pandemic?

The influenza virus is constantly mutating. That’s why we can’t get full immunity to the flu, the way we can to diseases like chicken pox, because there are multiple strains of the flu virus and they change from year to year. However, even though the virus makes us sick, our immune systems can usually muster enough of a response so that the flu is rarely fatal for healthy people.

2. What will happen if this outbreak gets classified as a pandemic?

Moving the world to pandemic phase 4 would be the signal for serious containment actions to be taken on the national and international level. Given that these actions would have major implications for the global economy, not to mention the effects of the public fear that would ensue, there is concern that the WHO may be considering politics along with science. “What the WHO did makes no sense,” says Osterholm. “In a potential pandemic, you need to have the WHO be beyond question, and (April 25) was not a good day for them.”

3. Why have the U.S. cases been so much milder than the ones in Mexico?

This is the question that has health officials from Geneva to Washington puzzled. In Mexico, swine flu has caused severe respiratory disease in a number of patients – and even more worryingly, has killed the sort of young and healthy people who can normally shrug off the flu. (Fueling such concerns is the fact that similar age groups died in unusually high numbers during the 1918 pandemic.) Yet the cases in the U.S. have all been mild and likely wouldn’t have even garnered much attention if doctors hadn’t begun actively looking for swine flu in recent days. “What we’re seeing in this country so far is not anywhere near the severity of what we’re hearing about in Mexico,” said the CDC’s Besser. “We need to understand that.”

4. How ready is the U.S. – and the world – to respond to a flu pandemic?

In some ways, the world is better prepared for a flu pandemic today than it has ever been. Thanks to concerns over H5N1 avian flu, the WHO, the U.S. and countries around the world have stockpiled millions of doses of antivirals that can help fight swine flu as well as other strains of influenza. The U.S. has a detailed pandemic preparation plan that was drafted under former President George W. Bush. Many other countries have similar plans. SARS and bird flu have given international health officials useful practice runs for dealing with a real pandemic. We can identify new viruses faster than ever before, and we have life-saving technologies – like artificial respirators and antivirals – that weren’t available back in 1918. “I believe that the world is much, much better prepared than we have ever been for dealing with this kind of situation,” said Fukuda.

5. So how scared should we be?

That depends on whom you ask. Officials at the CDC and the WHO have emphasized that while the swine flu situation is serious, they’re responding with an abundance of precautions.

But the truth is that every outbreak is unpredictable, and there’s a lot we don’t know yet about the new swine flu. There hasn’t been a flu pandemic for more than a generation, and there hasn’t been a truly virulent pandemic since long before the arrival of mass air transit. We’re in terra incognito here. Panic would be counterproductive – especially if it results in knee-jerk reactions like closing international borders, which would only complicate the public-health response. But neither should we downplay our very real vulnerabilities. As Napolitano put it: “This will be a marathon, not a sprint.” Be prepared.