Pandemic

Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and the How the World Can Finally Overcome It By Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin Penguin Press, 421 pp., $29.95 Few diseases have been the subject of more books than the HIV/AIDS pandemic, with such notable works as Randy Shilts' 1987 volume "And the Band Played On: People, Politics and the AIDS Epidemic" and Laurie Garrett's 1995 "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Disease in a World Out...

Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and the How the World Can Finally Overcome It By Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin Penguin Press, 421 pp., $29.95 Few diseases have been the subject of more books than the HIV/AIDS pandemic, with such notable works as Randy Shilts' 1987 volume "And the Band Played On: People, Politics and the AIDS Epidemic" and Laurie Garrett's 1995 "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Disease in a World Out...

In early April, a 10-year-old San Diego boy was found to be infected with a novel flu virus. The virus, identified as an H1N1 strain of swine origin, was soon matched to samples from Mexico, which had suffered a series of flu outbreaks beginning in March. Those outbreaks had led to a large number of deaths and hospitalizations. Because of its virulence and the low resistance amid the general population, global and U.S. public health officials quickly recognized that the new virus strain could have pandemic potential.

Laboratory-engineered strains of H5N1 influenza, also known as bird flu, aren't as dangerous as some have been led to believe, said a scientist involved in the controversial research Wednesday. The researcher, virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, has been at the center of an ongoing debate about bird flu research among public health and biodefense officials. He made his comments at the American Society for Microbiology's Biodefense and Emerging Diseases Research meeting, in Washington, D.C. Bird flu is lethal more than half of the time it strikes humans.

"T HE threat of an influenza pandemic is, at present, one of the most significant public health issues our nation and world faces. " — Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenback, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, April 2007 "We know that a pandemic will eventually occur. We always say it's not a question of if; it's a question of when. " — Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, April 2007 A year ago, concerns about pandemic flu were running high, with the threat of an outbreak making newspaper headlines and television newscasts.

Acknowledging that the development of medical countermeasures against bioterrorism threats and pandemic flu is lagging, federal authorities Thursday announced a $1.9-billion makeover of the system for identifying and manufacturing drugs and vaccines for public health emergencies. The overhaul includes refinements to manufacturing aimed at shaving weeks off the time it takes to produce pandemic flu vaccine, and a series of steps aimed at more quickly spotting promising scientific discoveries and getting them to market.

First-responders--firefighters, public health workers--know that when emergencies strike, they'll be on the scene. But those on the front lines are also human, and a new study points out that not all are willing to go to work in the event of a severe pandemic. The study, conducted by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health , surveyed 1,103 essential workers in Nassau County, New York (some of whom were involved with the attack on the World Trade Center)

The 2009-10 H1N1 influenza pandemic is officially over, the World Health Organization said Tuesday. "The new H1N1 influenza has largely run its course," WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said in a telephone news conference from Hong Kong. "We are now moving into the post-pandemic period. " Some places may see localized outbreaks of the pandemic H1N1 virus, commonly called swine flu, she said, but overall activity is expected to be about normal for the season. In particular, she noted, out-of-season outbreaks are no longer being observed in either the Northern or Southern hemisphere.

The likelihood of a third wave of pandemic H1N1 influenza appears to be declining as all indicators of swine flu activity remain low throughout the bulk of the country, according to data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Nobody can say for sure that we are totally out of the woods, but the further we go into spring and summer, the less likely we are to see another wave," said CDC spokesman Tom Skinner. It would not surprise the agency to see some local activity of the virus "continue to percolate along," he added.

As health officials brace for a new onslaught of illness from the novel H1N1 virus, they remain perplexed by one of the most unusual and unsettling patterns to emerge from this pandemic -- the tendency of the so-called swine flu to strike younger, healthier people. The initial explanation was that the elderly, who are usually most vulnerable to the flu, have built-in immunity as a result of their exposure more than 50 years ago to ancestors of today's pandemic strain. But the limits of the theory are becoming more clear.

A 22-member panel of experts convened by the World Health Organization has decided to extend a moratorium on research using laboratory-modified -- and potentially dangerous -- strains of the H5N1 influenza virus, also known as bird flu. The group also announced that two controversial H5N1 papers temporarily shelved by the presitigious journals Science and Nature would not be redacted and published in the near future, as originally planned.  Instead,...

In recent weeks I've had occasion to wonder whether Talmudic scholars of yore ever debated the question of what to do when a nice Jewish boy came down with swine flu. Less shameful than a diagnosis of trichinosis, perhaps, in which the subject would surely be harshly judged for his complicity in having partaken of undercooked pork. Yet hasn't a swine flu victim also ingested (or at least inhaled) the virus one way or another? Admittedly, this was not foremost on my mind when, in 2006, my wife and I purchased a drug called Tamiflu.

The film "Contagion" may have been fiction, but the 1918-19 influenza epidemic was horrifyingly real. The "Spanish flu" epidemic tore a path of destruction across the globe, killing an estimated 50-100 million people within months before disappearing into history. Now, evidence from U.S. soldiers felled by the virus reveals that it circulated in the country for four months before the pandemic was even identified. The findings, published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer a picture of a virus as it turned from common pathogen to killer bug, said senior author Jeffery Taubenberger, a pathologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md. "This was one of the worst infectious disease outbreaks that ever occurred," Taubenberger said.

The hit movie "Contagion" depicts a nightmare scenario: a bat virus jumps to pigs and then to humans, infecting them with abandon since they have no immunity to the novel bug. The virus circles the globe in a matter of days, causing coughs, fevers and seizures as scientists from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scramble to identify the pathogen and develop a vaccine. Before they do, millions are infected and about a quarter of them die. Those who are not sickened hunker down at home or panic in the streets, scrounging for food and supplies until the outbreak can be contained.

After 17 years, it appears the "The Lion King" still has a mighty roar. A 3-D version of Disney's popular 1994 animated film is hitting more than 2,000 theaters this weekend for a limited two-week engagement and is expected to launch with about $15 million, according to those who have seen pre-release audience surveys. That should put the movie in a tight race for No. 1 with "Contagion," the pandemic thriller that was most popular with moviegoers last weekend, when it opened to $22.4 million.

At this weekend's box office, "The Help" will finally be wiped out of first place by "Contagion. " After raking in more than $125 million domestically in the four weeks since its debut, "The Help" will be demoted this weekend when the Steven Soderbergh-directed thriller about a deadly pandemic becomes the top ticket seller. According to those who have seen pre-release audience surveys, "Contagion" will probably collect at least $25 million this weekend. Boasting an all-star cast including Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, the film is generating interest among both males and females and a range of ages.

Indiscriminate use of antiviral medications to prevent and treat influenza could ease the way for drug-resistant strains of the novel H1N1 virus, or swine flu, to emerge, public health officials warn -- making the fight against a pandemic that much harder. Already, a handful of cases of Tamiflu-resistant H1N1 have been reported this summer, and there is no shortage of examples of misuse of the antiviral medications, experts say. People often fail to complete a full course of the drug, according to a recent British report -- a scenario also likely to be occurring in the U.S. and one that encourages resistance.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans could die over the next two years if the vaccine and other control measures for the new H1N1 influenza are not effective, and, at the pandemic's peak, as much as 40% of the workforce could be affected, according to new estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is admittedly a worst-case scenario that the federal agency says it doesn't expect to occur.

A new influenza vaccine grown in cultured animal cells rather than eggs is at least as effective as conventional vaccines, a finding that could speed approval of the new way of producing the vaccine, researchers reported Tuesday. If the manufacturing technique is approved, it could improve the ability of vaccine makers to respond to emerging viruses and pandemics. The vaccine for the recent H1N1 influenza pandemic, for example, did not become available until the outbreak had already crested.

That H1N1 pandemic....no, it didn't lead to bodies piled high in the streets. But the point is, it could have -- pandemics sometimes do. And were we prepared? No, we were not. That's the bottom line of a perspective published in the New England Journal of Medicine right before Thanksgiving when our thoughts of birds had all to do with feasts and not the influenza A viruses many wild ones naturally harbor.   The commentary, which you can read in full on the Web , was penned by three scientists at RAND in Santa Monica and its main theme was vaccine acceptance.