-A lot of people pooh-pooh this, equating it to the Y2K scare. The medical community isn't thinking that way.
I've been hearing about this for a long time now. How long before we can safely say it was much ado about nothing? You know I am not a very superstitious person but sometimes I think the last great epidemic was an almost biblical thing related to the Great War.
Me too. The situation doesn't seem to be getting any better. When it first appeared in 1997 in Hong Kong, they thought they wiped it out. They were wrong, unfortunately.
How long before we can safely say it was much ado about nothing?
That's a good question. The answer might be, "when we develop a decent vaccine and a way to manufacture it quickly and distribute it widely" - much as we have for other pandemic diseases.
The problem with this disease is, like all influenza viruses, it mutates rapidly so there is no "one size fits all" vaccine we can develop and then forget about like for polio, smallpox or diphtheria. Each new variant must be addressed.
The key, I think, is the development of new 21st century vaccine technologies and their infrastructures. Currently, we are still using early 20th century ones using chicken eggs. Unfortunately, we nearly destroyed the vaccine industry in this country during the Clinton years, so we are starting almost from scratch. Other countries are way ahead of us.
Does that mean you are prepared for it if it comes? Or, are you just pooh-poohing the idea because it is a concept that you cannot grasp?
Isn't it better to be prepared and nothing happens than the converse?
I agree with Gritty: It'll be much ado about nothing once we have an entire new vaccination technology invented and the infrastructure for it fully constructed and ready to put into operation at a moment's notice. The problem with something like bird flu is that there is no expiration date on the problem. With Y2K, once we woke up on 1/1/2000 and saw that the world hadn't ended, we were able wipe our hands of the entire mess and forget about it. With H5N1 (or any other flu variant), the magic mutation could happen tomorrow, it could happen ten years from now, or it may never happen at all. It's just a never-ending game of craps being played every time another human gets infected from an animal. The odds for every individual crapshoot are greatly on our side, but when you're playing an infinite number of games...