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With all the chatter on my friends list about Avian Flu and the anthropologist asking the MPH and myself if she should worry tonight, I decided I should post something about this.
My focus and interest is in public health, which is a preventive practice focused on advising people on what the most effective and positive things they can do to protect their health. If I told you that if you ate right and exercised you would be almost guaranteed of living a healthy life, would you listen? If I told you I had a magic pill to prevent avian flu, would I make a million dollars? There are risks and then there are risks - as in, there are things you can do and things that you cannot. Avian flu is something that is serious and important, but worrying about it instead of taking your multivitamin and doing some weightbearing exercise isn't helping anyone.
Now, THESE people can do something:
The Flu Hunters
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS, November 7, 2004, The New York Times
Dr. Keiji Fukuda is, by nature, composed. His voice is soft and measured. He rarely employs exclamations, never swears.
At 49, Fukuda, the top influenza epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looks distinguished in a scruffy, academic way and reassuring. His face is unlined. His gray hair is close-cropped around his ears, making the top of his head rise like a pale dome above the timberline. He smiles often and gently. So when Keiji Fukuda admits to being as concerned as ''I have ever been,'' people who know him start really worrying.
In the past year, Fukuda has watched from his office in Atlanta as events overseas have seemed poised to spiral out of control. Between January and the end of October, 32 people have died from avian influenza in Vietnam and Thailand. Tens of millions of chickens have succumbed. Millions of others have been slaughtered. More nations have admitted to outbreaks among birds in more provinces than would have been conceivable even 18 months ago. All of this, Fukuda says, ''certainly increases the possibility'' of a much larger outbreak of avian flu among people.
Dr. Tim Uyeki, 45, one of the top epidemiologists who works with Fukuda at the C.D.C., is more excitable and blunt than his boss. ''You have the ingredients in Asia right now for a public health disaster,'' he says. Of long-term concern to him and Fukuda is that the region may be brewing a worldwide flu pandemic. ''It's a mess,'' Uyeki says. He is quiet. ''It would be nice,'' he continues, choosing his words with care, ''to be in the field, to be in Asia, to see firsthand what is going on.'' But he and the other C.D.C. scientists must be invited by other nations to help in disease investigations. Some countries prefer to do the work themselves. Others would like to keep the news of any outbreak off the world's radar screen, a difficult feat in the presence of a large international medical team.
Uyeki and Fukuda are 21st-century epidemiologists, and their job is not an easy one. They see themselves first and foremost as scientists. But in a globalized world where peripatetic germs hitch rides in the lungs or luggage of unwitting airline passengers, where sick chickens in Asia can threaten to topple third-world governments, where the role of politics and money can obscure the free flow of medical information, they cannot do their job -- preventing the spread of deadly flu viruses -- by being scientists only. They are medical monitors sitting at their desks, reading e-mail messages, Web sites, faxes and reports in order to track the varieties of flus in the United States and around the world. They are investigators who are prepared to jump on a plane to an outbreak site -- if invited -- and delicately interview the families of flu victims, trying to piece together how and why particular people fell ill and what the implications are for the rest of us. And less formally, they are diplomats, lobbyists, policy advocates, pressing for measures that governments would often prefer not to embrace.
While the United States has grappled this fall with a shortage of the human flu vaccine, Fukuda and Uyeki have been preoccupied with broader and more haunting questions. They and the 70 or so other members of the C.D.C. influenza team are the nation's first -- and in a worst-case scenario, last -- line of defense against an influenza pandemic. And as is inherent in such a task, they act from a position of pessimism. They live with the specter of the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed somewhere between 20 million and 50 million people around the world and 500,000 in this country, and with the assumption that another pandemic is inevitable.
( Read More )
My focus and interest is in public health, which is a preventive practice focused on advising people on what the most effective and positive things they can do to protect their health. If I told you that if you ate right and exercised you would be almost guaranteed of living a healthy life, would you listen? If I told you I had a magic pill to prevent avian flu, would I make a million dollars? There are risks and then there are risks - as in, there are things you can do and things that you cannot. Avian flu is something that is serious and important, but worrying about it instead of taking your multivitamin and doing some weightbearing exercise isn't helping anyone.
Now, THESE people can do something:
The Flu Hunters
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS, November 7, 2004, The New York Times
Dr. Keiji Fukuda is, by nature, composed. His voice is soft and measured. He rarely employs exclamations, never swears.
At 49, Fukuda, the top influenza epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looks distinguished in a scruffy, academic way and reassuring. His face is unlined. His gray hair is close-cropped around his ears, making the top of his head rise like a pale dome above the timberline. He smiles often and gently. So when Keiji Fukuda admits to being as concerned as ''I have ever been,'' people who know him start really worrying.
In the past year, Fukuda has watched from his office in Atlanta as events overseas have seemed poised to spiral out of control. Between January and the end of October, 32 people have died from avian influenza in Vietnam and Thailand. Tens of millions of chickens have succumbed. Millions of others have been slaughtered. More nations have admitted to outbreaks among birds in more provinces than would have been conceivable even 18 months ago. All of this, Fukuda says, ''certainly increases the possibility'' of a much larger outbreak of avian flu among people.
Dr. Tim Uyeki, 45, one of the top epidemiologists who works with Fukuda at the C.D.C., is more excitable and blunt than his boss. ''You have the ingredients in Asia right now for a public health disaster,'' he says. Of long-term concern to him and Fukuda is that the region may be brewing a worldwide flu pandemic. ''It's a mess,'' Uyeki says. He is quiet. ''It would be nice,'' he continues, choosing his words with care, ''to be in the field, to be in Asia, to see firsthand what is going on.'' But he and the other C.D.C. scientists must be invited by other nations to help in disease investigations. Some countries prefer to do the work themselves. Others would like to keep the news of any outbreak off the world's radar screen, a difficult feat in the presence of a large international medical team.
Uyeki and Fukuda are 21st-century epidemiologists, and their job is not an easy one. They see themselves first and foremost as scientists. But in a globalized world where peripatetic germs hitch rides in the lungs or luggage of unwitting airline passengers, where sick chickens in Asia can threaten to topple third-world governments, where the role of politics and money can obscure the free flow of medical information, they cannot do their job -- preventing the spread of deadly flu viruses -- by being scientists only. They are medical monitors sitting at their desks, reading e-mail messages, Web sites, faxes and reports in order to track the varieties of flus in the United States and around the world. They are investigators who are prepared to jump on a plane to an outbreak site -- if invited -- and delicately interview the families of flu victims, trying to piece together how and why particular people fell ill and what the implications are for the rest of us. And less formally, they are diplomats, lobbyists, policy advocates, pressing for measures that governments would often prefer not to embrace.
While the United States has grappled this fall with a shortage of the human flu vaccine, Fukuda and Uyeki have been preoccupied with broader and more haunting questions. They and the 70 or so other members of the C.D.C. influenza team are the nation's first -- and in a worst-case scenario, last -- line of defense against an influenza pandemic. And as is inherent in such a task, they act from a position of pessimism. They live with the specter of the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed somewhere between 20 million and 50 million people around the world and 500,000 in this country, and with the assumption that another pandemic is inevitable.
( Read More )
