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H5N1, R2D2, or Whatever
Rich Galen Wednesday October 12, 2005
All right. Like, I don't have enough to worry about? I listed, just Monday, about a thousand things which are going wrong and now we've got another one: Avian Flu.
I'm very serious about this. I � do � not � need � anything � else � right � now.
The specific strain of flu which has everyone's surgical mask in a twist is H5N1 which, over the past few months has killed about 65 people in Southeast Asia.
Why the big deal? Let's go through the numbers:
The normal mortality rate for flu is about one tenth of one percent. One person in a thousand. In the US about 36,000 people die as the result of the flu or complications each year.
The mortality rate for Spanish Flu during the 1918 pandemic was about 2.5 percent - twenty five times the norm. 675,000 Americans died of the flu during that period a small percentage of the 30-40 million who were estimated to have been killed worldwide.
This particular strain - if it gets into people - is very, very deadly. In Hong Kong 18 people were infected with it during an outbreak in 1997. Six of them died; a mortality rate of 33% - which is potentially twelve times more lethal than the Spanish Flu.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, "between 5% and 20%" of the US population is infected with influenza each year, "and more than 200,000 persons are hospitalized."
The SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) panic a couple of years ago in Canada and China infected about 8,000 people and killed 774 of them. A mortality rate of just under 10%.
(Long time readers may remember the Mullings Travelogue detailing my brush with SARS in 2003.) Let's take the lower end of the scale: Five percent of the population this year will get the flu. According to the Census Bureau the current population of the US is just under 300 million. If 1 in 20 get the flu this year that means 15 million of us will feel like hell sometime between January and March.
If H5N1 leaks into the population and is no more lethal than the 1918 flu then 375,000 people will die of the flu early next year. In the US alone.
But, if the numbers swell: 12% of the population is infected (about midway between the lowest and the highest years) and H5N1 is not twelve times more lethal than 1918, but has a mortality rate only twice as high, then 1.8 million people could die - three times the number of Americans who died in the 1918 outbreak.
If we get into SARS-like lethality ranges we might be dealing with somewhere in the vicinity of four million deaths.
In 1918, airplanes like the famous Sopwith Camel were made of wood and canvas, had a top speed of about 100 miles per hour, a range of less than 300 miles, and carried one or two people.
That's a long way from modern airliners which can carry an infected person among its 400-or-so passengers at just under the speed of sound from any point on the globe to just about any other point on the globe in less than a day.
That's why all the attention to H5N1.
Lede o' the Week: By British writer Chris Noon on Forbes.com about the bankruptcy of US auto parts maker Delphi:
LONDON - 'Tis not enough to help the feeble up, but to support him after, opined some fustian type once upon a time. Bankrupt U.S. car parts maker Delphi no doubt subscribes to a similar eleemosynary philosophy: The distressed outfit, which took to the road alone after being spun off from General Motors, is to ask GM to guarantee it $1 billion of business a month to support its restructuring blueprint.
I guess his editor musta been on holiday.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to the BBC and CDC pages as well a photo of a Sopwith Camel; a Mullfoto of George Washington's House, and a cute Catchy Caption of the Day.
--END --
Copyright © 2005 Richard A. Galen
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