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There are two things you can be certain about when it comes to flu pandemics: they’re inevitable and you never know when one will strike. That unpredictability makes it difficult to prepare for a pandemic — some 40 years passed between the pandemic of 1968 and 2009, yet only a little more than a decade [...]
I wrote a piece recently for the paper magazine—sadly behind the paymoat—on the viral ecologist Nathan Wolfe. Wolfe’s Global Viral Forecasting group has set up research teams in hotspots around the world—places like central Africa, China and Southeast Asia—where animal diseases are likely to cross over to human beings. That spillover has seeded most of [...]
Over on Healthland I have a post on a new online mapping project that will gather together reports of animal disease outbreaks from around the world. That data matters, and not just for vets—75% of the new, emerging and reemerging diseases affecting human beings at the start of the 21st century originated in human beings, [...]
Crossposted from TIME’s Wellness blog, because I find flu fascinating: So sayeth the World Health Organization (WHO)—and they should know, since they were the ones who declared a full, phase six-level pandemic a little more than a year ago. Now it’s done—this morning WHO head Dr. Margaret Chan announced that the group’s emergency committee of [...]
A cross post from TIME’s Wellness blog: The H1N1 flu pandemic last year came out of nowhere. Well, not exactly—H1N1 first emerged in human beings in Mexico. But that wasn’t where most influenza experts were looking. The focus had been on southeast Asia, where the H5N1 avian flu had been infecting—and killing—human beings for the [...]
