These are indeed troubled times for an already problem-saturated world. With the World Health Organisation reporting that the recent outbreak of the Swine Flu virus first detected in Mexico can no longer be contained, it is indeed time for desperate measures. WHO has raised its alert level to four, or two steps short of a full pandemic. Alert level four means the virus is showing a sustained ability to pass from human to human and is able to cause community-level outbreaks. Already, apart from Mexico and the United States, cases have been confirmed in New Zealand, Canada, Spain, Britain and even Israel.
The world hasn’t seen a pandemic in 41 years, when the “Hong Kong” flu crossed the globe and killed about one million people worldwide. If this swine flu outbreak reaches pandemic levels, what would happen next?
Recurrent outbreaks of Avian Influenza and the outbreak of SARS in 2003 rang alarm bells as potential pandemics. Although both jumped the “animal-to-human” barrier, neither disease mutated enough to enable sustained human-to-human infection, said Dr. K.Y. Yuen, head of microbiology at Hong Kong University. Strictly speaking, Avian Influenza and SARS did not become pandemics because they were too good at killing their hosts.
“For a sustained pandemic, it needs to be able to maintain human-to-human contact without killing its host off,” he said. Avian influenza “never became a man-to-man disease,” said Dr. Lo Wing-Luk, an infectious disease expert.
However, this swine flu is already a man-to-man disease, which makes it much more difficult to manage . and swine flu appears much more infectious than SARS.
According to epidemiologists and health experts, here’s what the world might see if there is another pandemic, based on past experience:
The disease would skip from city to city over an 18-to-24 month period, infecting more than a third of the population. World health Organization officials believe as many as 1.5 billion people around the globe would seek medical care and nearly 30 million would seek hospitalization. Based on the last pandemic and current world population, as many as 7 million people could die, epidemiologists said. Hospitals will become overcrowded, schools will close, businesses will close, airports will be empty.
It is already happening in Mexico, the eye of this hurrican-flu outbreak. The number of probable deaths from the virus there has risen to 152.
Furthermore, health facilities will become overrun with patients and there would be less-than-adequate staffing, as medical health professionals fall ill themselves, experts say. “We saw cases in SARS where people who should have gone to the hospital for things like cancer treatment didn’t go, and that resulted in higher deaths,” Dr. Lo said.
The very young and very old will likely be the most susceptible to the illness. Experts caution, much is still unknown about the current swine flu virus and its severity and it is too early to say whether it will lead to a pandemic. Right now, the focus is on finding answers and containing the spread.
Again, for those of us in Nigeria, the rate at which the flu is spreading calls for serious concerns. It is no gainsaying that majority of international flights to/fro this country are from the US and UK. And with the virus already confirmed in the UK, it is only a matter of time before cases are recorded in Africa, and especially in Nigeria. This scenario had better not occur because the outcome is better imagined than experienced. I presume the news media, electronic media and all available media of communication should have been flooded by now with information about the outbreak. Unfortunately, that is not the case. It took me quite some while before I could even find a mention of the swine influenza in news print. In fact, a quick survey of my neighbours and friends proved to me that majority of people are not even aware of this problem. That is very pathetic.
While the world is looking out for solutions to this crisis, it behoves on all our health authorities to rise up to the challenge and SAVE THE WORLD. May God help us.
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