HEADLINES IMUN RX
The Big One is coming, and it’s going to be a flu pandemic – Dr. Sanjay Gupta Chief Medical Correspondent CNN. Experts say we are ‘due’ for one. When it happens it will probably have a greater impact on humanity than anything else currently happening in the world.
When most people hear ‘flu’, they typically think of seasonal flu virus, which mutates a bit every year, is not particularly severe because our immune systems have likely seen a similar flu virus and know how to fight it.
Unlike seasonal flu, pandemics occur when a completely new or novel virus emerges.
Pandemic flu is a different animal. The result is something mankind has never seen before: a pathogen that can spread easily from person to defenseless person, our immune systems never primed to launch any sort of defense.
With pandemic flu, we cannot solely rely on our bodies’ ability to fight.
At present there is no pandemic flu vaccine available. The typical flu vaccine is pretty antiquated and hasn’t changed much in nearly 70 years.
There are methods that have the ability to ease suffering with antivirals, breathing machines and antibiotics for secondary bacterial infections.
The World Health Organization (WHO) argues that the antibiotics currently in development are not sufficient to counter rising antimicrobial resistance particularly in the pathogens that present the greatest threat to human health.
Bacteria and other disease causing microbes are becoming drug-resistant. Antimicrobial resistance will become “an even greater threat to mankind than cancer”.
Here is a printable copy of this article.
