Word: flu
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Read "How to Deal with Swine Flu: Heeding the Mistakes...
President Obama has often talked about the mess he inherited from his predecessor, but on this occasion, the worst imaginings of the Bush Administration served him well. Authorities in Mexico said 150 people are believed to have been killed by swine flu. More than 100 in seven other countries are infected. But it almost doesn't matter that Obama has had no Health and Human Services Secretary to manage the response--or a surgeon general or a head of the CDC or a border-patrol commissioner. The contingency plans were already in place...
...amid fears of bioterrorism or a deadly bird-flu outbreak, President George W. Bush proposed the $7 billion National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, meant to boost the availability of antivirals, ventilators and vaccines. Bush's plan was never fully funded; $870 million for flu-pandemic preparedness was actually dropped from the stimulus bill earlier this year. Still, it allowed the CDC to send diagnostic tests to labs around the country to track the flu's spread, while 11 million courses of Tamiflu were made available. "We are seeing a much more clear and cogent response than in the past," says...
...days of fever, chills and generally feeling rotten: that's a typical case of the flu. But several times a century, flu viruses mutate so radically that they can trigger a pandemic--as health experts fear could happen with swine flu. Influenza may go all the way back to the dawn of medicine; a similar illness was first described by Hippocrates, in Greece in 412 B.C. In 1485, a flulike "sweating sickness" swept across Britain, leaving many dead--and treatments of the time, including the bleeding of patients, didn't help...
...latest pandemics, in 1957 and 1968, were mild, with global death tolls of about 2 million and 1 million, respectively. But doctors live in fear of a killer like the 1918 Spanish flu, which caused up to 100 million deaths. Undertakers were so overwhelmed that corpses were left inside homes for days. Cities passed laws requiring citizens to wear masks in public places, but the virus defeated that barrier; little stemmed the spread of the disease. From 1917 to 1918, average life expectancy in the U.S. dropped an amazing 12 years. Cruelly, the 1918 virus was particularly lethal in young...