This year's flu vaccine shortage story is emblematic of the disaster that our health care system has become. Big Pharma would rather make their own patented drugs than vaccines that save lives because patent monopolies make for outrageous profits. Public health imperatives are not not well served by the current market system, and we are unprepared for a potential nightmare scenario that some fear we could face this as soon as this winter.
Yearly death tolls from human flu are about 30,000, or ten times 9/11. This could become an even more dire issue, as the A (H5N1) strain of bird flu, which kills about 75% of those infected, has recently been transmitted from person to person in Thailand. This is the development scientists were dreading, as the virus had previously only been transmissible from bird to human. If the virus mutates or picks up genes from a human flu virus in a person simultaneously infected with both, it has the potential to become the sort of virus that killed about 50 million people in the 1918 global pandemic. That virus was also a bird flu.
A lack of human flu vaccine in Asia due to insufficient production and contracts providing wealthy countries with vaccine first has jeopardized us all. More cases of simultaneous human flu and bird flu in Asia gives more opportunities for creation of more virulent strains capable of rapid and easy human-to-human transmission. Air travel makes this a particularly dangerous global problem.
Read More