The Next Plague Is Around the Corner

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 2:52 PM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Next Plague Is Around the Corner
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


The Next Plague Is Around the Corner
Disease experts are not worried about Ebola or Zika or even MERS—but
instead with a disease that has killed millions in the 20th century.
By PAUL A. OFFIT
Jun 4 2017
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-next-plague-is-around-the-corner>

Tony Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
It’s Fauci’s job to stop plagues before they start. Recently, Fauci was
asked which infection scared him the most. The questioner assumed that he
would say Ebola or Zika or MERS or SARS—all infections for which no
vaccines and no anti-viral medicines are commercially available. But he
didn’t. “Pandemic influenza,” he said.

Fauci isn’t the only one talking about pandemic flu these days. On April 7,
2017, Sanjay Gupta hosted a program on CNN titled “Unseen Enemy.” Gupta
linked his program to an article titled, “The Big One Is Coming, and It’s
Going to Be a Flu Pandemic”. On April 21, 2017, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) published a monograph titled, “Community
Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza—United States, 2017,”
highlighting non-pharmaceutical interventions to stop the spread of flu
like face masks, quarantine, and school closures.

Our fear of an influenza pandemic is best explained by the derivation of
the word pandemic, meaning “all people.” Several times a century, influenza
sweeps across the globe. For example:

• Between 1918 and 1919, Spanish influenza infected up to 40 percent of the
world’s population, killing 50 million people. In the United States,
between September 1918 and April 1919, 675,000 people died from the disease.

• Between 1957 and 1958, Asian influenza killed 4 million people in the
world and 70,000 in the United States. One reason that Asian flu wasn’t as
deadly as Spanish flu was that an American scientist saw it coming and made
a vaccine to prevent it—the first person in history to successfully predict
and modify an influenza pandemic. His name was Maurice Hilleman. Decades
later, Hilleman made a predication about the next great influenza pandemic.

On April 17, 1957, while sitting in his office at the Walter Reed Army
Medical Research Institute, Hilleman read an article in the New York Times
titled “Hong Kong Battling Influenza Epidemic.” “I saw an article that said
that there were 20,000 people lined up being taken to the dispensaries,” he
said. “And children with glassy-eyed stares, tied to their mother’s backs,
were waiting to be seen.” Public health officials estimated that the virus
had already infected 250,000 people, 10 percent of Hong Kong’s population.
Hilleman put down the paper: “My God,” he said, “This is the pandemic. It’s
here.”

One month later, Hilleman received throat washings from a navy serviceman
infected with the virus. Hilleman tested sera from hundreds of civilians in
the United States to see whether anyone had antibodies to the virus. No one
did. The strain of virus circulating in Hong Kong was new.

Hilleman then sent samples of what was later called Asian flu to six
American-based vaccine manufacturers. He figured that if he were to have
any hope of saving American lives, he would have to convince companies to
make and distribute influenza vaccine in four months. He also knew that the
production of millions of doses of influenza vaccine would require hundreds
of thousands of eggs a day. He urged farmers not to kill their roosters,
even though it was late in the hatching season.

Pharmaceutical companies made the first lots of Asian influenza vaccine in
June 1957. Vaccinations began in July. By late fall, companies had
distributed 40 million doses. At the beginning of the school year, Asian
influenza entered the United States. The National Health Survey estimated
that during the week of October 13 alone, 12 million people were sick with
influenza. Within a few months, influenza had infected 20 million
Americans. Although the 1957 pandemic killed only a fraction of those
killed during the 1918 pandemic, the two pandemics shared one sad feature:
the disease disproportionately killed healthy young people. During the 1957
pandemic more than 50 percent of infections occurred in children and
teenagers, at least a thousand of whom died from the disease—numbers that
would have been far greater had it not been for Hilleman’s vaccine.

[snip]

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