by Eric Nielson, UMN Law Student, MJLST Staff
Welcome to flu season. That wonderful time of year where we cross-contaminate millions of bioreactors in our schools and unleash the resulting concoction on humanity.
Flu kills thousands of Americans each year. The good news is that since H1N1 in 2009, we’ve gone without a serious flu pandemic threat. The bad news, according to researchers, is that may be just a matter of luck.
Researchers have recently published multiple methodologies for converting existing animal strains of flu into pandemic capable versions. Flu strains are tested on unimmunized ferrets which are believed to best represent the human disease response to flu (and are kind of cute in a weaselly way). In Korea, researchers created a highly contagious swine flu variant that produces 100% fatalities in brave test ferrets. While it is expected that humanity’s general immunity to flu would provide significant protective effect, it’s still a bit worrisome that a pandemic strain can be produced with equipment little better than a couple of cages and some animals.
Work on bird flu variants that had been mutated to produce contagious versions was also recently described by researchers in the Netherlands . The article states, “The introduction of receptor-binding site mutations Q222L/G224S and the mutations H103Y and T156A in HA, acquired during ferret passage, did not result in increased cross-reactivity with human antisera (table S6), indicating that humans do not have antibodies against the HA of the airborne-transmissible A/H5N1 virus that was selected in our experiments.” Or in plain English, this variation, made with minor mutagenic exposure and some ferrets was indeed a pandemic capable virus.
It is hard to know how bad a flu pandemic would be. The exemplary case of the Spanish Flu in 1918 had a death rate of 3-7% of the population. CDC estimates that a similar disease treated with modern medicine techniques would have a 1.2% death rate. That would mean approximately 3.77 million deaths in the United States. It should be recognized that the Spanish flu pandemic had two waves when the flu mutated and became much more deadly partway through. Anthrax (not a flu) was estimated to have a 75% or higher respiratory kill rate prior to the letter attacks on congress in 2001. The actual death rate from those attacks was 5 of 22 infected or 23%. While modern antivirals, antibiotics, hydration, and ventilators are effective, these resources would be limited in the event of a true pandemic. Especially considering the CDC estimates that 55 million Americans contracted H1N1.
There has not been significant legislation since James Hodge, Jr. stated in his article “Global Legal Triage in Response to the 2009 H1N1 Outbreak” published in 2010 in the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology that, “If H1N1 was a “test” run of the modern global public health system, then the system has fallen short.” While states have included pandemic preparedness into their planning,the overall level of preparedness is mixed.
The fact of American life is that our politics are reactive to crisis. Even shocks like the bird flu and swine flu have not been enough for our federal and local governments to develop plans to prepare for a pandemic. Instead, the lesson learned has been that there is nothing to worry about. Stay healthy.