Word: h5n1
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's good news, considering that the U.S. has purchased only 26 million doses of the newly licensed H5N1 flu vaccines, enough to cover 13 million people in the event of a pandemic -but there's no guarantee that H5N1 will even be the bug in question. In 1918 the Spanish flu infected 20% of the world's population and killed 40 million people (a mortality rate of 2.5%), and 550,000 of those deaths were in the U.S. What the new study illuminates is the small print behind that big number: some cities got hit much harder than others...
Public-health experts around the world share Hadiat's anxiety. The H5N1 strain of avian influenza, also known as bird flu, has been jumping from birds to people for years. The fear is that if bird flu manages to combine with a strain of human influenza and form a superstrain that easily spreads from person to person, it could threaten the lives of millions. Preventing a pandemic thus depends on tracking and controlling infected poultry, and nowhere is that challenge more daunting than in Indonesia. Home to 234 million people and 1.3 billion poultry, it has recorded more human deaths...
Bird flu may have fallen off the media radar lately, but that doesn't mean the threat has passed. Poultry continue to die from the H5N1 virus, and human cases have lately popped up in Egypt, Laos and Cambodia. The frontline in the war against the disease remains the Southeast Asian nation of Indonesia, which has recorded more bird flu fatalities - 75 deaths, including 18 this year - than any other country. But the world only has a partial idea of what's happening with bird flu in Indonesia. That's because the country stopping sharing samples of the H5N1 virus...
...dispute has centered on future flu vaccines that might be used from Indonesian viruses, but in reality that question could be moot. If H5N1 in Indonesia were to mutate significantly tomorrow and begin passing easily from human to human, triggering a pandemic, the virus would spread around the world rapidly. Scientists would begin working on a vaccine based on the pandemic virus, but it currently takes about six months to produce a new flu vaccine. (By contrast, the most recent influenza pandemics in 1968 and 1957 crossed the globe in about four months - and that was before widespread jet travel...
...That doesn't mean the fight is meaningless. International experts need to have samples in lab to fully analyze the behavior and genetic structure of the bird flu virus, looking for the all-important mutation that might mean H5N1 is ready to go pandemic. (Currently H5N1 only rarely infects human beings, but flu viruses change constantly - hence the need for up-to-date analysis.) Since Indonesia is where most new human bird flu cases have been occurring - as one Jakarta official acknowledged with a twist of pride, "We do have the most deadly virus" - scientists need to see Indonesian samples...