The Flu Is Scary When You Think About It

SOCIAL STUDIES - February 25, 2008

I have always heard that one of the largest health problems the world faces is the flu. To be honest, the next thing out of my mouth has usually been some kind of chuckle; I mean, can you imagine the flu of all things, being thought of as a serious problem?

A couple of days of discomfort and grogginess never hurt anyone. Or perhaps we are talking about some form of Darwinian evolution, the survival of the fittest and all that.

Still, I dutifully take my flu shot every year, and I am very sympathetic when I meet people who are, or have been, suffering; despite the fact that I have failed to grasp the doom and gloom, I do know from experience that it is terrible to be sick.

This week has opened my eyes. I, and a majority of my family, have been sick for days. And I mean sick. Unable to eat, spewing forth from both ends as if the sluice gates were perpetually opened, unable to sleep because of the cramps and muscle pain -- you get the idea. My 11-month-old daughter worries me the most as she is not gaining weight anyway, and now this. Perhaps there is something to this fear of the flu after all.

There was an Influenza outbreak at the beginning of the last century, known as the Spanish Flu, or La Grippe. Over the span from 1918 to 1919 the flu killed more people than did the Great World War. In fact, the flu killed more people that season than the Bubonic Plague, which came to be known as the Black Death, did during the five years from 1347 to 1351.

It is thought that this particular flu killed as many as 40 million people. It spread, perhaps from China, through military and commercial trade lines, first to Spain, then to America, and then around the globe. At first in the United States you were most likely to get it in a military training camp before you headed off to the trenches, but that soon changed.

In the U.S. alone, this pandemic shortened the average life span by 10 years, 28 per cent of the population was affected, and, unlike the usual morbidity patterns it mostly targeted those who were between 20 and 40 years old.

Imagine this -- you develop a cold, then some aches, then pneumonia, then cyanosis which means you are unable to get oxygen to your blood, and you eventually die gasping for air amidst the bloody froth. That is influenza. That is something to be worried about.

As anyone who gets a flu shot and then goes on to catch another strain of influenza would tell you, that is a very real and very potent threat for us all.

There are so many ways that the world is supposed to end; scientists recently revised their global sea level predictions and decided that we could be looking at a minimum of 100 foot rise over the next little while -- which puts Moncton and a whole lot of other cities completely under water. Others say the Ross Ice Shelf, or perhaps Greenland will slide into the ocean and cause an Ice Age. I have speculated in these pages that the poles will reverse sometime around 2012 ushering in the next global change.

But after a week of suffering and no end in sight, I am tempted to join T.S. Elliot who wrote in his epic poem The Hollow Men "this is the way the world ends . . . not with a bang but a whimper."

Morbidity rates vary from year to year, according to which strain of influenza is more prominent, but as a gross average the best you are looking at is 30 deaths for every 100,000 people, and the worst without a pandemic is 50 deaths. Now, this means a minimum of 10,000 deaths in Canada alone on average because of the flu, and 1,980,000 deaths worldwide. Keep in mind that most of the deaths do probably occur in less developed countries and so Canada might be lower, but worldwide some two million people might die of the flu this season -- which is incredibly scary.

The World Health Organization has recorded data going back over the centuries and has determined that every 100 year period brings with it three influenza pandemics. The Last three were the Spanish of 1918, the Asian of 1957, and the Hong Kong which occurred in 1968.

It also warns that the conditions are right for the first Pandemic of the new Millennium to occur soon. A pandemic, by the way, simply means a variant of the disease spreads worldwide and infects a larger population.

If you remember my statistics above, you can compare the worst of the last pandemics, the Spanish, which had a morbidity rate that measured somewhere around 1,500 per 100,000 people; or some 50 times the regular death rate.

This gets a little technical but the strain that will cause the problem, according to WHO, is H5N1, a variant of which is the Avian, or Bird Flu which makes the news every now and again. So far the Bird Flu usually stays in Asia, but it is still frightening.

The last two reported cases were on the 21st of February in Indonesia and of the 129 cases confirmed to date in Indonesia, 105 have been fatal.

Not only that; but influenza only ranks about 8th in the leading causes of death worldwide.

I am fairly confident that my family will weather this bout of disease; but I am certainly less confident that there is nothing to worry about.

When I hear that someone has the flu from now on, I am going to be a whole lot more concerned.

Somehow, we all have to figure out how to make this world a healthier place, so that all of these threats to our existence can be a little less threatening.