Can Influenza Pandemic be predicted? What are prerequisites for a large scale flu outbreak?

An influenza pandemic (a large scale flu outbreak) could hit without warning in the years to come, according to the “WHO” health experts. The World Health Organization has debated the likelihood of a flu pandemic – a flu that breaks out and spreads worldwide – in a statement published last Monday (March 11th).

Image of virus (pic: wikimedia commons)

Despite that our world is tightly-connected, yet the flu does not go pandemic every year. Why not?

One of the prerequisites for a flu to become a pandemic, is the appearance of a new strain of virus, said Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, director of Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

The usual strains behind the annual epidemics – confined outbreaks of viral infections – are those we are already familiar with.

Pandemics are epidemics that expand dramatically covering a large area, usually the entire world.

Those already infected with these viruses, develop some immunity to them and this immunity prevents the viruses from contaminating the rest of the population.

Pandemics take place when a new strain of virus emerges and is so different than our immune systems are unable to recognize it.

These strains normally develop in animals – pigs or birds – before contaminating the humans. But such transition does not happen too often, because animal viruses are quite different from human viruses.

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A virus completing all 3 conditions is the “winner”. “Viruses are changing all the time,” and flu viruses are particularly good at it, said Garcia-Sastre. And every time an animal flu virus has a “combination of lucky mutations,” which allows it to meet the three requirements, he added.

The latest flu pandemic was triggered by a virus that jumped from pigs to humans in 2009. Dubbed as the swine flu, the pandemic killed more than 200,000 people.

The catastrophic influenza pandemic that broke out in 1918 had its origin in birds. The H1N1 virus killed between 30 million and 50 million people around the world including an estimated 675,000 Americans.

The big question is not if we will have another pandemic, but when. Humans need to be vigilant and prepared – the cost of a major influenza outbreak will far outweigh the price of prevention!

Although most scientists believe another influenza pandemic will occur, it is difficult to predict when or where it will appear or how severe it will be.

There is no method capable to make an accurate prediction on when a flu pandemic strikes, but this is something that happens every 10 to 40 years.

However, we can take precautionary measures to prevent a flu pandemic. These steps include performing increasingly more research into how to determine viruses that can jump from animal to human; finding ways to stop contact between animals infected with the virus and humans; and as some teams around the world do, working to find a universal vaccine that could protect against all influenza viruses.
Source: LiveScience
Photo credit: Wikimedia.org