Word: h1n1
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...Even if H1N1 seems to lack the killer instinct at the moment, flu viruses are unpredictable, and there's no guarantee that it couldn't change form. Flu season in the southern hemisphere is just beginning, and if the virus establishes itself in countries like Argentina or Australia, it could cause real damage. And there are still open mysteries, like why the bulk of the infections in the U.S. - and the confirmed deaths thus far in Mexico - have been found in people who are relatively young, which is unusual for the flu, or why this strain seems to be spreading...
...Still, a little more than a week after the WHO first swung into high alert, it's easy to wonder whether H1N1 might turn out to be much ado about not that much. Certainly the actions of some countries - like Egypt's impulsive move to cull some 300,000 pigs and China's apparent decision to preemptively quarantine hundreds of Mexican nationals - smack of panic. In the U.S., too, hundreds of schools have temporarily closed down because of suspected or confirmed swine flu cases, with Fort Worth, Texas, making the decision to shut down all city schools until...
...that would be a mistake. First of all, it's important to understand that pandemic does not necessarily equal apocalypse. A pandemic occurs when a new flu virus emerges and starts spreading easily from person to person, and then from country to country. (To declare Stage 6 for H1N1, the WHO needs to see sustained spread of the virus in multiple regions of the world; so far, that has happened only in North America.) A pandemic doesn't mean that a new virus is unusually deadly, only that it spreads easily - as H1N1 seems to do. It wasn't possible...
...reality is that we live on a planet where new, potentially dangerous diseases are constantly emerging. Over the past six years alone, we've seen SARS, a more virulent bird flu and now H1N1, not to mention countless other pathogens that have escaped public notice but still keep infectious-disease experts lying awake at night. Thanks to the efforts of the WHO, we've built a remarkable early-detection system for new diseases - one sensitive enough to catch major threats and minor ones - and we should be rational enough to heed its warnings without acting as if the sky were...
...take mass transportation, but the truth is that many travelers these days are still feeling skittish about getting on a plane. In a recent TripAdvisor.com poll of 2,857 users of the site, a quarter of the people who responded said they were changing their plans because of the H1N1 flu virus...