The Bird Flu Vaccine That Isn’t
Reading Daniel Drezner’s post today about a possible avian flu vaccine, one would think that things are looking up. However, according to Effect Measure, the article to which he links may be overly optimistic. Not only is this little ray of hope dimmer than expected, but reading this post over at FuturePundit, it becomes obvious that while a prompt response with the current tools we have (quarantine and antivirals) may have a chance at preventing a pandemic, it’s unlikely that we’d be able to actually pull it off.
Avian Flu is one of those issues that has mostly been lurking in the background, rearing its head every so often but never receiving the attention it probably deserves. Hopefully it won’t explode in our faces, but a highly mobile virus with the ability to spread to humans isn’t a good starting point for anything. Purely from a statistical point of view, it is only a matter of time before a strain evolves that can pass from person to person. Worse yet, it has a roughly 50% mortality rate in humans. This is high enough to be very worrisome, but low enough that the virus would not be self-limiting; it would kill and incapacitate too few people to stop its spread naturally. A good weblog tracking the progress of this threat is over at the creatively named “Avian Flu“.