India Uncut
This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.
Sunday, July 31, 2005
Influenza: A worldwide threat
David Brown writes in the Washington Post:
(WAPO link via Primary Red who wonders if India would be ready to deal with such an epidemic. Ha.)
Public health officials preparing to battle what they view as an inevitable influenza pandemic say the world lacks the medical weapons to fight the disease effectively, and will not have them anytime soon.The word that strands out in the above extract: "inevitable". If or when a pandemic -- an outbreak of epidemics across continents -- does take place, most governments will shrug it off as an unforeseen calamity. But it is anything but unforeseen: check out this excellent special section on the possibility of an outbreak of avian flu in the magazine, Foreign Affairs.
Public health specialists and manufacturers are working frantically to develop vaccines, drugs, strategies for quarantining and treating the ill, and plans for international cooperation, but these efforts will take years. Meanwhile, the most dangerous strain of influenza to appear in decades -- the H5N1 "bird flu" in Asia -- is showing up in new populations of birds, and occasionally people, almost by the month, global health officials say.
(WAPO link via Primary Red who wonders if India would be ready to deal with such an epidemic. Ha.)
