Influenza pandemic – when?
It’s getting fashionable to suggest that there may not be an influenza pandemic. The American Spectator says we should stop squaking over avian flu, and Mike the Mad Biologist thinks a pandemic is a low probability event, although he’s still worried about it.
An influenza pandemic is not a low probability event, it’s a certainty. Simple statistical analysis tells us this. The uncertainty is predicting when: this year, 10 years, 100 years time?
We’ve seen it all before:
And it might not be H5N1, it could well be H9N2, or even H2N2. The only certainty, as you can see from the timeline, is that it will happen sooner or later.
So what’s the worst that could happen?
- A pandemic of human-adapted avian influenza such as the H5N1 virus (or any of the others).
- Such a reassortant could easily have a mortality rate of 30-40%.
- Within a few months 10-25% of the world’s population could have been infected.
- 6.3 billion * 0.4 * 0.25 = over half a billion deaths.
- or worse …
[...] Influenza pandemic – when? [...]