Pandemics

Infectious disease experts have had plenty to worry about in recent decades, including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Zika. But one disease scares them above all others—influenza. That’s right, the flu.

news.emory.edu - by Martha McKenzie - December 2018

Even though many people dismiss and misunderstand it—calling everything from a cold to a stomach bug “the flu”— influenza actually claims 12,000 to 56,000 lives in the U.S. every year. And that’s in a normal flu season.

Every so often, a flu pandemic emerges. That’s when a new strain appears that is so different from what has circulated before that people have no immunity to it. A hundred years ago, the 1918 H1N1 pandemic swept the globe infecting about a third of the world’s population and killing 50 million to 100 million people. Since then, there have been three more pandemics, in 1957, 1968, and 2009.

The next pandemic, say experts, is a question of when, not if. Are we ready?

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Health workers attending to an H7N9 avian flu patient in Wuhan, China, in 2017. CreditCreditAgence France-Presse -- Getty Images

CLICK HERE - WHO - Pandemic influenza preparedness Framework for the sharing of influenza viruses and access to vaccines and other benefits (68 page .PDF document)

Despite an international agreement, U.S. health authorities still have not received H7N9 avian flu specimens from their Chinese counterparts.

nytimes.com - by Emily Baumgaertner - August 27, 2018

For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples of a rapidly evolving influenza virus from the United States — specimens needed to develop vaccines and treatments, according to federal health officials.

Despite persistent requests from government officials and research institutions, China has not provided samples of the dangerous virus, a type of bird flu called H7N9. In the past, such exchanges have been mostly routine under rules established by the World Health Organization.

CLICK HERE - WHO - R&D Blueprint - List of Blueprint priority diseases

telegraph.co.uk - by Alanna Shaikh - March 10, 2018

Over two days in early February, the World Health Organisation (WHO) convened an expert committee at its Geneva headquarters to consider the unthinkable.

The goal was to identify pathogens with the potential to spread and kill millions but for which there are currently no, or insufficient, countermeasures available . . . 

 . . . In addition to eight frightening but familiar diseases including Ebola, Zika, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the list included a ninth global threat: Disease X.

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ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE - Mysterious 'Disease X' Could Be The Next Deadly Global Epidemic, WHO Warns

Ebola virus budding from surface of cells, from a scanning electron micrograph.  Image credits: NIAID

CLICK HERE - The Global Virome Project

insidescience.org - by Benjamin Plackett - February 22, 2018

 . . . In an article published in Science magazine today, Daszak and a group of like-minded scientists described a new initiative, called the Virome project, that would identify and catalogue hundreds of thousands of yet-to-be-discovered viruses found in wild animals.

The team estimates that there are about 1.6 million undiscovered virus types and that somewhere between 631,000-827,000 could potentially spill over into humans. The viruses are found mostly in wild mammals.

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