Spring Break
Swine flu may be the next great pandemic
Sanjai Tripathi
Issue date: 4/28/09 Section: Forum
Last year, I was a recent graduate from OSU in microbiology, working on an AmeriCorps project in disaster planning.
That was a strange but interesting job. Basically, I had to think of the worst things that could happen and how those things would affect society, and then try to make it better.
The first part of that job was risk analysis. Using a heuristic, we created a list of priority disasters to plan for by assessing them on two major dimensions: frequency of occurrence and potential severity of impact.
Some of the results were obvious to people. Major earthquakes have a fairly low frequency in Oregon, such as once every 300 to 800 years - the last one was 309 years ago - but the severity can be huge. A 9-point or higher Cascadia Subduction Zone quake, very much like the one off of Sumatra in 2004 that caused the Asian tsunami and was one of the worst disasters in human history, will eventually strike a few miles off the Oregon Coast.
Similarly, people understand higher frequency events like floods and winter storms. They aren't as high on the severity scale, but they happen a few times every generation.
When we think "disaster," these are things that come to mind because we have experience with them. We've seen what quakes do to California, and we have recent memory of big floods and storms.
In my risk analyses, I always added another disaster to the priority list that I suspect left some people wondering. It was pandemic flu.
We don't have recent experience with that, so it isn't part of the public's general awareness.
Disaster planners are aware of it, though, especially those in the public health field. They know that while it hasn't happened lately, it is just a matter of time.
Every year we have newer strains of flu going around the world, infecting people and making them sick. Flu actually kills around 40,000 Americans, mostly elderly, each year.
We don't usually freak out about the death toll, though, because frankly, elderly people die from lots of things. It's what they do, and while we hope to prevent it, we accept that we often cannot.
That was a strange but interesting job. Basically, I had to think of the worst things that could happen and how those things would affect society, and then try to make it better.
The first part of that job was risk analysis. Using a heuristic, we created a list of priority disasters to plan for by assessing them on two major dimensions: frequency of occurrence and potential severity of impact.
Some of the results were obvious to people. Major earthquakes have a fairly low frequency in Oregon, such as once every 300 to 800 years - the last one was 309 years ago - but the severity can be huge. A 9-point or higher Cascadia Subduction Zone quake, very much like the one off of Sumatra in 2004 that caused the Asian tsunami and was one of the worst disasters in human history, will eventually strike a few miles off the Oregon Coast.
Similarly, people understand higher frequency events like floods and winter storms. They aren't as high on the severity scale, but they happen a few times every generation.
When we think "disaster," these are things that come to mind because we have experience with them. We've seen what quakes do to California, and we have recent memory of big floods and storms.
In my risk analyses, I always added another disaster to the priority list that I suspect left some people wondering. It was pandemic flu.
We don't have recent experience with that, so it isn't part of the public's general awareness.
Disaster planners are aware of it, though, especially those in the public health field. They know that while it hasn't happened lately, it is just a matter of time.
Every year we have newer strains of flu going around the world, infecting people and making them sick. Flu actually kills around 40,000 Americans, mostly elderly, each year.
We don't usually freak out about the death toll, though, because frankly, elderly people die from lots of things. It's what they do, and while we hope to prevent it, we accept that we often cannot.
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