anyone else freaking out about the predicted flu pandemic?

I've been hearing news reports and reading some articles for a while now about the predictions that the avian flu could morph into a strain that could lead to human to human contact. In fact, it's already happened.

Now, experts are predicting, it's only a matter of time before the flu spreads. I always want to believe that this time of reporting IS scare-mongering, but I'm starting to think maybe it isn't.

I did hear that for some people, it'll just be a matter of being confined to bed for the better part of two weeks (a concern I suppose for the corporate world), but I get scared for those with compromised immune systems... and the kidlets. And the old folks.

Here's an article that appeared in the National Post this morning:

Parallels with the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak

Mark Kennedy
CanWest News Service

March 9, 2005

GENEVA - There are frightening similarities between the bird flu virus raging in Southeast Asia that threatens to spark a global human influenza pandemic and the devastating Spanish flu outbreak that killed tens of millions of people in 1918.

That warning comes from the World Health Organization and top virologists and epidemiologists around the globe who are nervously watching the situation unfold in Thailand and Vietnam, where this week the first possible human-to-human transmission between unrelated people emerged, raising the spectre the virus is changing to become more easily spread among humans.

No one wants to predict that the flu virus -- known as H5N1 -- currently causing so much concern will mutate into a strain as virulent as the one that swept through the world 87 years ago.

Indeed, public health experts at the WHO stress they still don't know how dangerous the next pandemic will be. But they add ominously that while it could be a mild virus that kills as few as two million people, the scenario could be much worse, with fatalities of more than 50 million worldwide.

And in North America, top experts are urging people not to become indifferent to their warnings that a flu pandemic will some day sweep through the world.

"We're not scare-mongering here," said Frank Plummer, scientific director of the Winnipeg-based national microbiology lab, part of the Public Health Agency of Canada. "We're not crying wolf. There is a wolf. We just don't know when it's coming."

In the meantime, experts are gripped by the eerie parallels with the most devastating public health disaster in history.

"Similarities between the H5N1 and 1918 viruses have been suggested in the gradual adaptation of an avian to a human-like virus, the severity of disease, its concentration in young and healthy people, and the occurrence of primary viral pneumonia in addition to secondary bacterial pneumonia," the WHO writes in a report that includes a section on the "assessment of the threat."

One of the top flu pandemic experts in the United States calls the parallels between today's H5N1 virus and the strain in 1918 "frightening."

"It is killing an otherwise healthy group of people in the prime of their life. And it is doing it with an illness that is so reminiscent of 1918: respiratory distress syndrome," Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said in an interview.

It is generally believed that what killed most of the 1918 flu's young victims -- often within 48 hours, as their lungs filled with blood -- was a massive immune system overreaction to the virus.

If it happens again, writes Mr. Osterholm, "modern medicine has little in its arsenal to fight it."

He suggests people consider the devastation of the recent tsunamis in South Asia: "Duplicate it in every major urban centre and rural community around the planet simultaneously, add in the paralyzing fear and panic of contagion, and we begin to get some sense of the potential of pandemic influenza."