It is amazing the amount of mumbo-jumbo that is circulating in the internet and the news regarding the swine flu epidemic in Mexico and elsewhere. Some hypothesis are so stupid that it won't deserve mention here (such as a mail a receive today saying that the flu was brought here by Obama to kill all the narcos!, or another suggesting it is a major conspirational business between the pharmaceutical companies, the PAN political party and the swine industry to boost a major obscure business! Believe it or not! )
How do someone like me (with training in both medicine and disease ecology) see the current situation?
Well, first and foremost, epidemics and pandemics are natural phenomena of population regulation. As natural as hurricanes, earthquakes, the migration of animals such as wildebeest in the Serengeti or the Monarch butterflies. As natural as the carbon cycles in ecosystems. It is thought that there has been epidemics of flu in human populations every single century. Some of them such as the Spanish flu killed millions of people. Some became pandemics, others did not.
The problem is that we live in an overcrowded planet with more than 6.7 billion humans moving around the world at rates never seen before. So the earth as been kind of shrinking and become a "global village", really. We also live in an era of communication with internet and satellites facilitating the spread of information (of all kinds). So we have to be cautious about what we read and what we believe.
However, it is precisely because of these (too many people, too much movement of them, too much consumption) that some epidemics are no longer as natural as they should be and therefore the whole thing becomes much more complicated. For example, human encroachment in the last frontiers of civilization on earth such as the tropical forest of central Africa and the Amazon get humans in contact with novel microbes and diseases and it is there and then when spill-over happens. In pure terms of disease ecology we know so little about the spill-over/spill-back phenomena in emerging infectious diseases that is a novel area of cutting-edge research.
Here a good number of serious links to read about disease ecology, pandemics and the kind:
Nathan Wolfe from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health talking in TED about avoiding the next pandemic
Center for Conservation Medicine
Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta
Global Viral Forecasting Initiative
Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases
More later...
