Pandemic
Imagine you’re sitting in the middle row on a six-hour flight from
San Francisco to New York. The person seated to your right seems
to have a cold and coughs all the way, exposing you to that illness.
But what’s really scary is the possibility that the person to your left
is carrying a dangerous microbe without even knowing it. The time
between when a person becomes infected with a microbe and when
symptoms begin is the incubation period of that microbe. Dr. Mary
E. Wilson is a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics and a
medical editor for
Health Information for International Travel
, a CDC
publication. She says, “The elimination of . . . barriers, especially by
long-distance air transport, means that humans can reach almost any
part of the Earth today within the incubation period for most microbes
that cause disease in humans.” So people can unknowingly spread
dangerous infections during the incubation period.
In 2009 air travel contributed to the spread of a new strain of flu
known as H1N1, or swine flu. H1N1 started in Mexico in March
2009 after the flu season there would normally have been over. Flu is
typically most dangerous for the elderly, but H1N1 hit children and
young people harder. One month later, H1N1 reached the United
States, then Canada, and it soon spread to seventy-four countries.
On June 11, 2009, Dr. Margaret Chan, then director-general of
WHO, said, “The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza
pandemic. . . . No previous pandemic has been detected so early or
watched so closely, in real-time, right at the very beginning.”
Former president Barack Obama declared H1N1 a national
emergency in the United States on October 24, 2009. A laboratory-
related delay slowed the release of the newly developed H1N1 vaccine,
leaving millions of Americans without protection. Between April 2009
and April 2010, nearly 61 million people around the world developed
the H1N1 flu. Experts estimated the global death toll of H1N1 to be
284,000 people, about fifteen times more than the number of actual
laboratory-confirmed deaths.
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