But restrictions on air travel could delay the arrival of a flu and ensure that there is enough time to institute preventive measures.
Better to look at exactly what is going on.The arrival of bird flu in Europe and its neighbourhood has caused most of the flap, yet the cases in Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Iran, Austria, Germany, France, Hungary and Croatia are only in wild birds.
No sooner had Britain started a test of its defences against bird flu than a swan found dead a week earlier in Fife, near Edinburgh, tested positive for H5N1, the most virulent strain of the disease.The arrival of bird flu in Britain had long been expected, after its rapid progress westward from Asia, through Turkey and into Western Europe.
In such places, people live more closely with poultry, and the arrival of bird flu is cause for concern because it could lead to many new human cases.In Europe, surveillance and veterinary health care are good, so the opportunities for infection of poultry workers (and subsequent mutation of the virus) are limited.
With the arrival of H1N1 flu last year, social scientists Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, realized they had an unusual opportunity to use their knowledge of social networks to forecast a flu outbreak among undergraduates.
The analysis of excess (flu-attributable) mortality yielded results consistent with our inference that vaccine effectiveness is the reason why the arrival of influenza strengthened the vaccination-mortality association: During flu season, mortality was higher by 7.8%95%5% confidence interval: 5.7, 9.9) than at the same time of the year when influenza virus was not circulating.
In the United States, Britain and other countries, despite the relatively high morbidity and mortality rates that resulted from the epidemic in 1918 1919, the Spanish flu began to fade from public awareness over the decades until the arrival of news about bird flu and other pandemics in the 1990s and 2000s.
My children, reluctant recipients of flu shots since their arrivals in our family, will celebrate this one.
The devastating arrival of AIDS, SARS, H5N1 (a strain of bird flu) and H1N1 (commonly dubbed swine flu) exposed that as wishful thinking.
