If you've turned on your TV or looked at a newspaper in the last day or two, you've heard breathless coverage about the swine flu "pandemic" in Mexico. Of course if you live in Alabama, you may not know about this since it's been pretty much wall to wall coverage of the big wrecks at the Talladega NASCAR race for the last couple of news cycles.
Don't you just love the media? First of all, it's not a pandemic . . . yet. For this breakout to become a pandemic it has to go global and effect a whole lot more people than it has so far.
While it's true that over 100 people in Mexico have died from this bug, which is pretty bad, the cases that are showing up in the US appear to be much milder.
The real news from this is that the European Union's health commissioner today urged Europeans to postpone nonessential travel to the United States or Mexico due to swine flu.
What does this mean for us and our trip? Who knows? Is it theoretically possible that this flu outbreak could cause all transatlantic travel to be stopped for a period of time and cancel our trip? Yeah, I guess, but it's really unlikely. Let's hope that this outbreak is contained and it's old news in a month or so when we're heading to Europe.
Experts say that stopping air travel at this point won't work anyway as it's really difficult to contain a flu breakout by banning travel quickly enough in these days of air travel. Besides, the first case of this bug has already been reported in Spain, so the virus has made it to the EU already.
So here's the advice from our Médecin examinateur En chef (Colleen, our chief medical officer). "When you get to the what to pack or update entries, can you post a reminder to everyone to make sure that they have had a flu shot this year? (not that it covers Influenza A H1N1) I am monitoring the swine flu issue, and am packing a N95 mask for each of us in case things get worse. Everyone should pack hand sanitizer. Wouldn't it be crazy to be quarantined in France?"
3 comments:
I just read that this critter may already be in France. There are four suspected cases in France now and test results will be available in the next day or so to confirm whether this is the dreaded swine flu.
Actually, it does meet the definition of the term pandemic: It's a disease new to a population, it infects humans causing serious illness (as it has in Mexico), and it spreads easily and sustainably in humans. Now, to put it into perspective - so far there have been 100 reported deaths in Mexico but they don't know how many others may have the disease but didn't succumb. 36,000 people die each year in the U.S. from the flu. The scary thing is that there isn't a vaccine for it yet because it appears to be a mutated strain of swine flu and a human flu. I was listening to reports this morning indicating that we will know much more about this within the next 5-7 days - we have CDC personnel on the ground in Mexico City investigating the outbreak. Personally, I don't think we should be concerned about travel occuring six weeks from now.
This is interesting and not so clear cut. Try Googling "epidemic vs. pandemic", and you'll see what I mean.
I don't think this is widespread or pervasive enough to be called a pandemic quite yet, although I couldn't find a good definition that said what percent of a population or number of people have to contract a disease for it to reach pandemic levels.
But the idea of a pandemic is that it has to hit a whole bunch of people and/or spread globally to be a pandemic.
I agree that the media fever should break well before we go, even if the flu bug doesn't go away.
It's a good thing that colleges are getting out soon. Talk about an ideal breeding ground for germs.
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