That Mexican officials are reporting that a significant number of their flu dead are young to middle-aged citizens should give us cause to ask if cytokine storms were detected in their deaths. If so, this would not be a good omen.
Brett also has his doubts about the effectiveness of the two current drugs being offered for relief and recovery, oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza), which were not even designed for this new strain. Worse still, to paraphrase Brett, these expensive drugs are not available to the majority of third world populations.
Meanwhile it takes time, of course, to develop and manufacture a new vaccine, so, to quote Brett, "(they are) unlikely to develop one fast enough and in volume enough to head off a pandemic." If and when this mutation does goes pandemic and becomes unstoppable without a viable vaccine, it will simply runs its course, however destructive, and then gradually weaken over time until "herd immunity develops", a sort of collective, species-wide immune response to a threatening disease.
Brett also recalls how the swine flu vaccine of 1976 became an embarrassing fiasco after a national panic set in when 19-year-old Pvt. David Lewis died of swine flu at Ford Dix, New Jersey. A hefty marketing campaign was then launched to inveigle Americans to get inoculated and some 46,000,000 people, according to Brett, were given the vaccine before the flu scare fizzled out. Only Pvt. David Lewis died of the disease, but scores died from the side effects of the vaccine, which apparently even included Guillain-Barre Syndrome, although this was not officially confirmed statistically. This is a disease that can leave a person paralyzed for days or weeks.
At this point it is too early to tell which way this new A (H1N1) strain will go, or whether it will even become a pandemic. The news so far is not encouraging. We will just have to wait and see. I want to thank Dr. Nienaber for sharing his knowledge with us and ask all of us to stay calm, cool and collected.
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