If you haven’t already, put Crawford Kilian’s H5N1 blog on your regular reading list. There, while you’ll still get updates on the H5N1 avian flu virus and occasional pieces on H1N1 flu (and you can see a multitude of archived posts from 2009 filled with international material on the progress of last year’s flu — and the reaction to it), you now get a much-expanded scope, including news and commentary on the spread of infectious diseases of different sorts.
What I value about H5N1 is the tracking of the mosquito-borne viral diseases, like dengue and chikungunya as well as H1N1, that reveal the effects of the elision of ecosystem boundaries; the close attention to outbreaks that stem from changes in human-animal interactions — like the recent outbreak of plague in Tibet and, of course, H5N1; and the watch it keeps on the vaccine trade, as in yesterday’s post picking up a report in The Nation on the purchase of flu vaccine from France and one last week on a US tech company’s trials of a new flu vaccine (which won’t help the public but is, apparently, already helping the company to get richer).
The kind of close attention to the details of complex interactions amongst humans, animals, and both the natural environment and the economic one that H5N1 shows is indispensable. It should spur more interest in wresting public health away from the simple-minded mass-vaccination schemes of medical officials in the U.S. and other wealthy countries — the point of which is usually to transfer public monies into the hands of pharmaceutical companies. And move us to toward a more complex and inclusive view of the nature of health.
Tags: dengue, epidemics, H1N1 flu, immunization, Medicine, one world one health, pandemic, plague, swine flu.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 at 8:58 am and is filed under climate change, Disease, epidemics, Health Professions, News, Outbreaks, Physicians, public health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
