Harvard expert: Why I believe a killer flu pandemic is lurking just beyond the corner – and it could kill 33 MILLION people in the first 200 days
Jonathan Quick is a medical doctor one of the world’s top health professionals
He fears a major influenza outbreak could kill 300 million people in two years
Fortunately, he also has a possible solution…but will it be enough to save us all?
By DR JONATHAN D. QUICK
DAILYMAIL.COM
6 March 2018
The big one is coming: a global virus pandemic that could kill 33 million victims in its first 200 days.
Within the ensuing two years, more than 300 million people could perish worldwide.
At the extreme, with disrupted supply of food and medicines and without enough survivors to run computer or energy systems, the global economy would collapse. Starvation and looting could lay waste to parts of the world.
It’s a disaster movie nightmare. Yet it is waiting to come true, thanks to influenza — the most diabolical, hardest-to-control and fastest-spreading potential viral killer known to humankind.
As a medical doctor and a health chief who has led global programmes at the World Health Organisation (WHO), I believe that the world is at risk of a viral pandemic that will be at least as deadly as anything we have ever known before.
The most likely culprit will be a new and unprecedentedly deadly mutation of the influenza virus. The conditions are right. It could happen tomorrow.
The good news is that there is much we can do to prevent this. The bad news is that much of it is not being done.
We are just as vulnerable now as we were 100 years ago, when the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic infected a third of the world’s population and wiped out up to 100 million people. It remains the deadliest flu outbreak in history.
A century on, the history and biology of the influenza virus tells us that we should expect another major global pandemic soon. Experts say it is already overdue.
Human influenza usually starts with wild aquatic birds, because avian flu is very common in waterfowl.
Once in a while, a wild bird virus gets friendly with a different strain inside another bird, or even a pig. The different strains can then swap genes, effectively swapping skills such as being highly contagious or deadly.
The Rest…HERE
