Word: influenza
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...prepared are we for all that? Not very. To its credit, this Administration has struggled to get ahead of the curve. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson considered influenza among his highest priorities. In his last speech as Secretary, he called it his gravest concern. Under him, funding for influenza increased 1,000% despite opposition from House Republicans, who took the threat seriously only after last year's vaccine debacle, when almost half the nation's supply became unavailable because of contamination...
Barry is visiting scholar at the Tulane-Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research and the author of The Great Influenza...
Suddenly old warnings about flu, which had seemed so remote, were sounding a lot scarier. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared in September, once again, that as far as an influenza pandemic is concerned, the question is not if but when, not whether millions would die but how many millions. President George W. Bush talked last week for the first time about how he, as Commander in Chief, might respond to an epidemic, raising the possibility of using troops to enforce quarantines. He also recommended that folks read John Barry's book on the 1918 pandemic that killed more than...
...prospect of a flu epidemic makes us wobbly. We bounce back and forth between being scared silly and just plain apathetic. Influenza regularly kills 1 million people a year--36,000 of them in the U.S.--yet most of us don't get vaccinated. The new threat requires a different response--a healthy respect for the toll that even a moderate pandemic may take on our society and just enough genuine fear to figure out some smart steps to take to minimize the damage. "We need to scare people into their wits, not out of them," says Michael Osterholm, director...
...influenza viruses--if you trace their lineage back far enough--got their start in birds, and the great majority stay there. But a handful of flu viruses adapt to the point that they can infect people. Each year the viruses capable of invading human cells mutate slightly in a way that leads to fresh outbreaks, but most people will still have a partial immunity because of previous exposure to similar viruses. Occasionally, though, a strain that had seemed to infect only birds will cross over more or less intact into humans. Because this new strain is so different from garden...