The New Season. There is a saying popular among Eastern Canadians that only two seasons
exist: winter and construction (formerly known as summer).
There is a saying popular among Eastern Canadians that only two seasons exist: winter and construction (formerly known as summer).
With milder winters predominant in the last few years, spring has been almost undetectable. Although the start of fall used to be signalled by the slow change from greens to yellows and reds, instead fall now signals the beginning of what could be considered the third most recognizable season: the flu season.
During the summer my inbox and news scans offered little with respect to the media buzz surrounding avian influenza and the ever-looming flu pandemic. But since early September, my e-mail inbox is once again filling up with press releases and information on these subjects.
Did avian influenza take a summer hiatus? Of course it didn’t. Although the number of new human and avian infections has slowed, H5N1 is still very much on the radar.
So why the sudden increase in flu pandemic references? It’s likely a combination of multiple factors, but with children back in school and fluctuations in the weather providing ideal conditions for viruses, flu is on the minds of many in the medical community.
I have grown quite weary of news reports on flu pandemic research and planning and am quite frankly not looking forward to another season of this. I realize that H5N1 shows numerous similarities to the Spanish flu of 1918, but did the medical research community just wake up from a 90-year slumber? H5N1 is not the only influenza since 1918 to cross the animal-human barrier and it is not the only pathogen that has the potential to cause a pandemic.
It is, however, lingering, in minds as well as continents.
While most of the research and funding efforts are concentrating concentrated on the development of anti-virals and genetic mapping, Asia is still reporting new human and poultry cases. But little progress seems to have been made with respect to understanding how the virus is spreading in the birds on that continent, leaving numerous questions unanswered.
Has the scientific community taken the easy route and resigned itself to believing that a pandemic is inevitable?
In some respects, I think this to be true. Disease spread is hard to manage when economics is a deciding factor for many and, whether they will or will not to play by the rules. Reports of smuggling, illegal transport and import, backyard rearing practices, and cultural practices using poultry have all been implicated in the spread of the disease.
But H5N1 has not spread to other continents as rapidly, if at all, as was predicted in the spring. Migratory bird surveillance in the both the United States and Canada has failed to identify H5 or H7 subtypes in tens of thousands of wild birds tested. Surveillance in Europe and in the Middle East has identified H5N1in several countries, but this identification has not, in most cases, resulted in disease outbreak in humans or commercial poultry.
I think public health organizations and the media need to publicize more than surveillance data and pandemic preparedness. The time has come to discuss how scientific bodies and health units are trying to understand what is going on in Asia and other affected countries and what is being done to identify the weak spots in their biosecurity and government controls.
This may not sell papers or invoke the same interest but it would provide the public with some balance. It may also serve to bring other countries up to speed with respect to disease reporting and emergency planning.
But, unfortunately, that is not how those organizations work. I suspect we’re all in for another season of media hype.
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