Business Continuity

Why Plan for a Pandemic – Some History

Written by Barbara Davi

It started, harmlessly enough, with a cough drowned out by the raging world war. It was known as Spanish influenza only because censorship by the warring governments wouldn’t allow reports of the spreading illness for fear it would damage morale.

However, Spain, being neutral, allowed its press to publicize what was happening. The first cable read, “A STRANGE FORM OF DISEASE OF EPIDEMIC CHARACTER HAS APPEARED IN MADRID.”  Because of the censors, even as millions were dying around the globe, the world press was apt to report little about the pandemic beyond what the Spanish King Alfonzo’s temperature was that morning.5 In Spain, they called it the French flu.

“The year 1918 has gone,” the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote in the Christmas issue, “a year momentous as the termination of the cruelest war in the annals of the human race; a year which marked the end, at least for a time, of man’s destruction of man; unfortunately, a year in which developed a most fatal infectious disease….” That most fatal diseases killed about 10 times more Americans than did the war. In fact, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), “The 1918 influenza pandemic killed more people in less time than any other disease before or since,”9 the “most deadly disease event in the history of humanity.”

The word “epidemic” comes from the Greek epi, meaning “upon,” and demos, meaning “people.”  The word “pandemic” comes from the Greek word pandemos, meaning “upon all the people.”  Most outbreaks of disease are geographically confined, just like most disasters in general. Wars, famines, earthquakes, and acts of terror, for example, tend to be localized both in time and space. We look on in horror but may not be affected ourselves. Pandemics are different. Pandemics are worldwide epidemics. They happen everywhere at once, coast to coast, and can drag on for more than a year. “With Hurricane Katrina, people opened their homes, sent checks and people found safe-havens,” writes a global economic strategist at a leading investment firm, but with a pandemic, “there is nowhere to turn, no safe place to evacuate.”

Those who suffer anaphylactic reactions to bee stings or food allergies know the power of the human immune system. In their case, exposure to certain foreign stimuli can trigger a massive overreaction of the body’s immune system that, without treatment, could literally drop them dead within minutes. Our immune systems are equipped to explode at any moment, yet there are layers of fail-safe mechanisms that protect most people from such an overreaction. The influenza virus has learned, though, how to flick off the safety.

Both the 1918 virus and the threat, H5N1 with variants, seem to trigger a “cytokine storm,” an over-exuberant immune reaction to the virus.  In laboratory cultures of human lung tissue, infection with the H5N1 type virus led to the production of ten times the level of cytokines induced by regular seasonal flu viruses. The chemical messengers trigger a massive inflammatory reaction in the lungs. “It’s kind of like inviting in trucks full of dynamite,” says a lead researcher who first discovered the phenomenon with H5N1.

While cytokines are vital to antiviral defense, the virus may trigger too much of a good thing. The flood of cytokines overstimulates immune components like Natural Killer Cells, which go on a killing spree, causing so much collateral damage that the lungs start filling up with fluid. It actually turns your immune system on its head, and it causes that part to be the thing that kills you.  All these cytokines get produced and call in every immune cell possible to attack yourself.  It’s how people die so quickly. In 24 to 36 hours, their lungs just become bloody rags.

People between 20 and 40 years of age tend to have the strongest immune systems. You spend the first 20 years of your life building up your immune system, and then, starting around age 40, the system’s strength begins to wane. That is why this age range is particularly vulnerable because it’s your own immune system that may kill you.  A new dog learning old tricks, H5N1 may be following in the 1918 virus’s footsteps.

Either we wipe out the virus within days or the virus wipes out us. The virus doesn’t care either way. By the time the host wins or dies, it expects to have moved on to virgin territory—and in a dying host, the cytokine storm may even produce a few final spasms of coughing, allowing the virus to jump the burning ship. As one biologist recounted, the body’s desperate shotgun approach to defending against infection is “somewhat like trying to kill a mosquito with a machete—you may kill that mosquito, but most of the blood on the floor will be yours.

Professor Kennedy Shortridge, the virologist who first identified H5N1 in Hong Kong’s chickens, describes influenza as being caused by an “unintelligent, unstable virus.” A fellow colleague put it bluntly: “Flu’s not clever. Forget the idea that the virus is clever. The virus is clumsy. It makes lots of mistakes when it’s copying itself, the ones that have an advantage get selected, and that’s why it’s successful.”  No other human respiratory virus has this kind of mutation rate.

Minnesota, the “land of 10,000 lakes,” is the largest brooding area for aquatic birds in the United States. More wild waterfowl hatch there every year than anywhere else in the country. In addition, it’s a central flyway for migratory waterfowl flying south from Canada in the fall.  Minnesota also happens to be the nation’s number-one turkey-producing state.  That combination gave the state the dubious distinction of avian influenza “capital of the world”.1

Source: Tiki-Toki The largest epidemics and pandemics in human history!

Fast Forward to May 2015 (hope you get the irony, that this was written seven years ago.)

News Release:
May 2015

US - There have been four more outbreaks of H5N2 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) confirmed in the US, as the epidemic continues. The outbreaks are added to the rising number of avian flu detections in the hardest-hit states of Minnesota and Iowa.

• There have now been 174 detections of avian flu in the US since it was first found in December, and the total number of birds affected now stands at 38,946,573.
• These four detections of the disease occurred on two commercial turkey farms, one commercial chicken farm and one backyard flock of mixed poultry.
• The latest outbreaks were confirmed by the US Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
• The locations of these confirmed avian flu cases are:
• Minnesota, Kandiyohi County - 42,600 commercial turkeys;
• Minnesota, Renville County - 625,500 commercial chickens;
• Iowa, Sac County - 28,400 commercial turkeys;
• Iowa, Sioux county - backyard mixed poultry, number pending.
• These cases all occurred in the Mississippi flyway. 
• The two latest outbreaks bring the number of detections in Iowa to 51, affecting 26,634,900 birds.

The Iowa State Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship has announced that they are also looking into several unconfirmed outbreaks of HPAI.  The unconfirmed cases include commercial turkey and pullet farms as well as egg laying operations. They were found in Sioux, Buena Vista, Sac and Calhoun counties.

These additional detections are likely to take the tally in Iowa to 62. The Department said they have quarantined the premises and once the presence of the disease is confirmed, all birds on the properties will be humanely euthanized to prevent the spread of the disease.  Minnesota has detected 84 outbreaks, affecting 5,116,260 birds.

The latest outbreaks were found some days before confirmation, but the Minnesota state government said that it has not received any new reports of presumed avian flu cases for five straight days, as of 20 May.  The state government also stated that the first round of backyard flock surveillance, testing, and observation in all control areas is complete, with nearly 4,000 backyard flocks now tested for avian influenza or monitored for signs of the disease.2