You Say We Got A Pandemic – Famous Flu Throughout History

Admit it.  If someone sneezes near you, you want to cover yourself in plastic sheeting, spray yourself down with Lysol, and call a priest.  Nobody wants to catch the dreaded Swine Flu, scientifically H1N1, and the media isn’t doing anything to make us feel any better about the situation.

Believe it or not, this is not some new bizarre illness.  It’s just one of the many forms the flu can take.  Actually, the H1N1 virus is the most common of the flu viruses.  The bad news on that is that it was also the strain that was involved in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.  The good news is that it was an avian strain of the H1N1 virus, and those seem to be the nastiest and most damaging types.  I guess pig flu is kinder.  Or maybe not.

The current strain that is going around is reportedly made up of four different flu viruses.  It’s got bits of North American avian AND swine flu, a bit of swine flu that’s from Asia and Europe, and a bit of regular old human flu.  It’s what New Scientist calls “an unusually mongrelised mix of genetic sequences.”  That sounds extra scary, doesn’t it?

But does it sound pandemic scary?  President Obama has declared this flu a national emergency, and the WHO is calling it a pandemic.  So far in 2009 there have been 399,234 confirmed cases with 4735 deaths.  For those of you freaking out, the Virginia numbers are much less scary, but still tragic.  21 people have lost their lives to this flu.  18 of them had health conditions that were exacerbated by the flu, so that should make you feel better, but you can’t deny that the fear is real and people are plenty scared.

Compared to previous pandemics, this one seems mild – not that anyone is complaining.  If we can keep this from spreading, we can avoid situations like:

• The Asiatic Flu – started in 1889 and killed 1 million people
• The Spanish Flu – started in 1918 and killed 3% of the world’s population (50-100 million people)
• The Asian Flu – started in 1956 and killed 2 million people
• The Hong Kong Flu – started in 1968 and killed 1 million people

More good news is that plenty of people are getting the flu and getting over it pretty quickly.  While 11% to 14% of Virginia’s ER and urgent-care visits are related to flu symptoms (compared to 7% on a normal year), people are getting treated and recovering pretty quickly.  When you do the math on that (7.7 million people in Virginia, an average of about 400,000 ER visits per week) , you see that the death rate isn’t exactly soaring.  But that’s no reason not to be cautious.  Keep your hands clean and away from your face, get vaccinated (if you can – more on that in a minute), drink lots of water, and eat your veggies.  Keep the flu away and keep this “pandemic” from becoming a REAL pandemic.

photo by The Artifex

**For vaccination information, call the Health Department at 1-877-ASK-VDH3 to find out where to get one of the 870,000 doses coming into Virginia this month.

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