Insights into Pandemics

There is a great interview entitled On the Front Lines of the Next Pandemic on O'Reilly Radar under the "Emerging Technology" tab (dated Feb 23, 2009... you may need to scroll to find it). It features Dr. Nathan Wolfe founder and director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative which monitors the transfer of new diseases from animals to humans. Interviewer is James Turner. Out takes below:

JT: The last disease that really made a big splash with the media was Ebola, earlier in this decade. But we really haven't heard much recently. Have things calmed down as far as new and novel diseases? Or are we just hearing less about outbreaks these days?

NW: Well, I mean I think we've had really substantive important pandemics. If you take a look at SARS, for example. SARS really only infected about 1,200 individuals, but its impact was tremendous. It was billions of dollars of economic impact all throughout the world. Even in a place like Singapore, where you had a small number of cases, you had an incredibly substantive financial impact. And then, of course, right now we have H5N1 which is -- they call it the bird flu. Actually, most influenzas are bird influenzas, so it's a little bit of a misnomer. But H5N1 is a virus which is spreading around the world in birds. And if it does make a transition into humans, which some bird flu will over the next 20 to 30 years, it could be incredibly devastating. So I think that these are kind of constant and present dangers. They're things that are increasing over time simply because of the way that we're connected as a human population.......

JT: Another question I had was we tend to be, as a race, very focused on the crisis du jour and I'd say probably right at the moment, the crisis du jour is the fact that no one has any money. How does that affect our focus on these more serious long-term problems, but ones that are easy to forget when you've got a hungry kid?

NW: I think just like in any area of work, what a group of people are doing sometimes will be the subject of attention and discussion and sometimes won't. But in our case, we just plow ahead doing what we're doing. People become very excited about the disease du jour. Say it's bird flu and they get very excited about it one minute. And perhaps at that moment, their fear of a pandemic or of a major disaster is higher than say the people who have studied that phenomenon. But then later on, they focus on other things and they think the risk has gone away. And then their perception of the risk is lower.

And I think for those of us whose job it is to monitor these things on a day-to-day basis, our objective is just to keep steady and solid and not necessarily be too confused about whether people are focusing too much on it or not focusing on it and really just try to assess the risks. And that's obviously what we do. But I do think it's the kind of thing that in the long haul we don't want to be distracted from this from a policy perspective, from a funding perspective. We need to keep on these things because their impact on economies is absolutely massive. .....