It’s only a matter of time before H7N9 virus boards a bus out of China and runs free on to foreign soil, where it could spread through the air like wildfire, reports Time magazine – now available in Pakistan.
On a hyperconnected planet rife with hyperinfectious diseases, experts warn we aren’t ready to keep America–and the world–safe from the next pandemic
Across China, the virus that could spark the next pandemic is already circulating. It’s a bird flu called H7N9, and true to its name, it mostly infects poultry. Lately, however, it’s started jumping from chickens to humans more readily–bad news, because the virus is a killer. During a recent spike, 88% of people infected got pneumonia, three-quarters ended up in intensive care with severe respiratory problems, and 41% died.
What H7N9 can’t do–yet–is spread easily from person to person, but experts know that could change. The longer the virus spends in humans, the better the chance that it might mutate to become more contagious–and once that happens, it’s only a matter of time before it boards a bus out of China and onto runs free on foreign soil, where it could spread through the air like wildfire.
From Ebola in West Africa to Zika in South America to MERS in the Middle East, dangerous outbreaks are on the rise around the world. The number of new diseases per decade has increased nearly fourfold over the past 60 years, and since 1980, the number of outbreaks per year has more than tripled.
Some recent outbreaks registered in the U.S. as no more than a blip in the news, while others, like Ebola, triggered an intense but temporary panic. And while a mutant bug that moves from chickens in China to humans in cities around the world may seem like something out of a Hollywood script, the danger the world faces from H7N9–and countless other pathogens with the potential to cause enormous harm–isn’t science fiction. Rather, it’s the highly plausible nightmare scenario that should be keeping the President up at night.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ranks H7N9 as the flu strain with the greatest potential to cause a pandemic–an infectious-disease outbreak that goes global. If a more contagious H7N9 were to be anywhere near as deadly as it is now, the death toll could be in the tens of millions.
The consequences of a major pandemic on public health would be world-changing. The 1918 flu pandemic killed 50 million to 100 million people–at the top end, more than the combined total casualties of World Wars I and II–and for a slew of reasons, humans are arguably more vulnerable today than they were 100 years ago. First of all, there are simply more of us. The number of people on the planet has doubled in the past 50 years, which means more humans to get infected and to infect others, especially in densely populated cities. Because people no longer stay in one place–nearly 4 billion trips were taken by air last year–neither do diseases. An infection in all but the most remote corner of the world can make its way to a major city in a day or less. (To read full content of the report please subscribe to the Time magazine).