More frequent flu warnings should breed vigilance, not complacency. H7N9 flu could evolve to pass readily between people at any moment
HERE we go again. Four years ago this week, the world watched agog as a newly discovered strain of flu spread, with shocking rapidity, from its starting point in Mexico to countries across the globe. The H1N1 swine flu did what SARS and H5N1 bird flu failed to do: it turned into the pandemic that health experts had been dreading.
Luckily, the 2009 flu turned out to be quite mild. But its relatively low death toll was taken by some as evidence that the public health response had been an expensive overreaction. The scientists had cried wolf, they claimed – perhaps at the behest of vaccine manufacturers (New Scientist, 22 May 2010, page 26).
Now we are faced with a worrying new outbreak of flu, this time from China. So far H7N9 avian flu has not been able to pass readily from person to person. That might change at any time – and if it does, there's every reason to fear the worst. That's not just because the new flu seems to be at the lethal end of the scale. It's also because we are barely any better equipped to deal with a pandemic than we were in 2009 – despite considerable scope to improve our readiness (see "Why we are sitting ducks for China's bird flu").
We have made some progress. Better monitoring has allowed us to track this outbreak more closely, although we still don't know exactly where it came from ("Where has H7N9 bird flu come from?"). Last year's controversial research on what makes a flu strain dangerous has proved its worth by uncovering the H7N9 threat long before we might otherwise have spotted it.
As we continue to get better at spotting potentially dangerous infectious diseases, we can expect alarm bells to start ringing more frequently. The danger is that this will breed complacency, rather than vigilance – and that this will be encouraged by those myopic types who will only accept that the warnings are meaningful if the worst actually comes to pass.
We cannot afford complacency. We are still a long way from being able to contain flu, and so the risk of a pandemic remains very real. Of course, there is always a place for healthy scepticism. Science, more than any other field of human endeavour, prizes it. But we should not spend so much time debating whether scientists are crying wolf that we forget that wolves really do exist.
This article appeared in print under the headline "The wolf at the door"
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