What is the threat of a pandemic?
The devastation of a global pandemic is best illustrated by the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, when perhaps a third of the world’s population became infected, and estimates of deaths tend to exceed 50,000,000, including over 675,000 Americans. The virus in the Spanish Flu pandemic was an H1N1 strain of “Bird Flu” that spread to humans and then was quickly transmitted human-to-human. Today, another “Bird Flu” virus–H5N1–shows potential for becoming highly transmissible and lethal on a pandemic scale. It has already developed the capacity for “relay transmission” between poultry and wild birds, and has moved from South-East Asia to Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe (including Great Britain). Humans in close contact with birds have contracted the virus, and human-to-human transmission appears already to be possible, though cases have so far been rare and unsustained. The virus may weaken as it mutates, but if and by how much it may do so is unclear. As of June 2009, the World
