Pandemic Ahoy! ...Not
A Thought on the 2009 Flu Season
by Gerylann Bobbie
12.05.09


Whilst perusing a selection of backdated newspapers, there was a peculiar and rather intriguing front page to the "Seacoast Sunday" edition paper with stark, black letters that proclaim, "Flu fears". The much less imposing, but still ominous subtext boldly proclaims that "many people have questions, want shots" in a solid nod to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. The page inspires a bit of anxiety in those with a healthy fear of needles, with a hand at the ready over the sacred and much sought-after H1N1 flu vaccination that many patients have been denied since the unusually early start of the flu season. Now, it has been a point of contention in many conversations over the purported and media-touted pandemic that the nation is facing, mostly over the immature and inane game of keep-away that the CDC is playing with the vaccination. Conspiracy theorists are convinced (and will fight to the death to defend the notion) that the H1N1 flu is some secret project that the biological research agencies have been whipping up in their nefarious test tubes and the "shortage" of flu vaccines is their way of studying the virus in the wild; in short, "they" have enough of the vaccine and will only release it if the flu gets nastier than intended. It's a theory, with no more substance than the hype that has surrounded the H1N1 flu and it's more likely that the CDC and sister agencies are merely trying to settle the hysteria they caused with the initial dirges sung for patients with H1N1.

The truth in the matter is, now that H1N1 has exited the exotic phase and entered the novel phase, many people are finding that H1N1 is no more virulent or dangerous than Influenza A (also known as the common flu). The director for the Maine CDC branch can be quoted as saying that "there's no need in the vast majority of times to be tested (for H1N1). It's just like the regular flu (and) if you get sick, the vast majority will recover fully and uneventfully at home". It is further stated that testing isn't really needed, since there's a 99.9% possibility that, if someone is ill, they have H1N1 since reports of Influenza A infections are practically nonexistent. And therein lays the key: H1N1 is just a mildly more aggressive form of Influenza A, not some doomsday virus poised to wipe humanity off of the face of existence. However, with all of the warnings and ominous predictions made by the CDC and their fellows in mid-2009, it was inevitable that hysteria would follow. It's the natural course of things; living in cloistered conditions, where human contact is unavoidable, and having learned all about the Black Plague in grade school has made the common man wary of epidemics, pandemics, and whatever else occurs. And, unfortunately, not everyone can afford a PhD in virology, so the general masses are left to trust the select few who can afford those coveted degrees and the extensive training that goes with them. What that leaves the nation with is a group of agencies that are trying to take back what they said and a body of people that just want to protect themselves from a virus that is no more deadly than its annoying, common cousin.

What's more, there have been far more vicious and potentially genocidal viruses that have blown over without a peep. Certainly, people remember the Chinese pandemic scare in 1997, when H5N1 (avian flu) started taking down people in denominations of ten without prejudice. The H5N1 strain that first killed a little boy with untreatable symptoms was dismissed as a fluke, since the strain was a killer of chickens, not men. The Chinese dismissed the singular death as a tragic, yet unexplainable, loss and put the file in cold storage, apparently forgetting that viruses have the ability to mutate and do bizarre things - like make species jumps. In the case of H5N1, the hemagglutinin (or the cells that allow for a virus to adhere to a host cell) took on the characteristics of the infected host and mutated to allow for survival through a new (and much more plentiful) species of hosts. In November and December of 1997, almost twenty people fell ill with the same rash of symptoms, ranging from the atypical fever, cough, and sore throat, to pneumonia and renal failure; 5 of those reported patients died. That was the point in time when global virologists decided to take the H5N1 virus seriously and began to investigate the then-unexplainable virus, finding that avians were the direct source of the virus and that its genomic structure was advanced enough that it was capable of mutation across species. The answer then was to kill 1.5 million birds and then breathe a huge sigh of relief when H5N1 slipped quietly into obscurity again.

Maybe the scare of a potentially cataclysmic epidemic and the initial failure to investigate the exotic pathogen is what scared the world when H1N1 came around. In all fairness, the virus does have all but three genetic markers in common with the influenza strain that affects pigs, which is almost the exact same condition that H5N1 came with. Did the CDC overreact after the 1997 scare and throw up the red flags to avoid a pandemic? Did they look too closely at the problem and get too anxious over the similarities between the two viral cousins? The common man will never know why such a fuss was made over H1N1, but the common man seriously needs to listen to the same entities that scared them straight to the vaccination line and understand that H1N1 is a kin to Influenza A and that it is no more dangerous than the common winter pest. Those that suffer from immunological impairment, are pregnant, very young or old, or suffer from chronic respiratory disorders should take this ambitious bug seriously, as seriously as they would take the onset of any other flu season. The rest of the population needs to simmer down and stop adding insult to injury by overreacting where those highly trained viral consultants already have.