100 million reasons to think of H1N1

I've listened to so many people offer their opinion on H1N1.  How the government wants to scare people into getting the vaccine so that they might be able to mix something sinister into the injection.  Or that health departments are exaggerating the severity of the virus to highlight the need for healthcare reform.  Or to enrich the companies creating and distributing the vaccine.

I’ve heard many average people say they think this flu really isn’t that bad – that it isn’t even more serious than a normal seasonal flu virus.  What?

My neighbor, like many people, thinks that this H1N1 talk is all hype.  Like almost everyone, he has no background in virology or epidemiology.  Maybe he knows of the 1918 flu, but is he aware that the 1918 strain is very similar to the one floating around his office this week?  That the microscopic H1N1 particles on the door to his building, on the bathroom faucet, and on his hands are a subtype of the H1N1 virus that, between 1918 and 1920, killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide?  It is.  And in just two short years, it killed as many people as if a nuclear weapon was used on cities across the world.

OK, my neighbor is not a scientist, but he is just using common sense, right?  This strain doesn’t seem any worse than a normal flu bug.

Really?

The real peril is not the first wave of the virus – like the one we’re seeing now – but the strain that is seen once that same virus mutates.  In the flu season leading into 1918, the initial viral strain was also “not that bad” and similar to seasonal flu.  Then the virus mutated.  One third of the earth’s human population became infected – 500 million people.  And up to 20% of those people died.  Many of the people that died were healthy young adults – those with the very best immune systems.  The strongest individuals suffered a “cytokine storm”, where the immune systems over-reacted and often triggered a fatal pneumonia.

Trust me, the CDC and Health Departments across the globe are looking for that next mutation – like the one that happened early in 1918 to the mild first version of the virus.  But anyone that says this is just a mild flu and that health experts are over-reacting is dead wrong – and misinformed.

Now the big question – will immunity via vaccine to the mild version of the flu protect one from the mutated version – if it mutates?  Well I’m not a virologist either, but I would guess that there’s a chance that some protection might be possible.  That’s what people will be asking in the next phase of this process…

Should we trust the experts on virology and epidemiology?  Scientists that have studied the past and are trying to protect us from the next deadly phase of H1N1?  It’s your choice, but I would say that we are blessed to have the choice that people in 1918 did not have.