Past Pandemics Provide Mixed Clues to H1N1's Next Moves

摘要

Ask influenza researchers where they think the swine flu outbreak is heading, and the stock reply is a flat-out refusal to speculate. But ask them whether their research into other influenza viruses and the course of past pandemics hold any clues, and they have insights aplenty. And many lessons from the past, they say, upend cherished dogma.rnLike hurricane watchers, public health officials must try to predict the velocity and course of the influenza A virus causing this outbreak, a novel H1N1, because they have to make complicated and expensive decisions about how aggressively they should pursue vaccines, antivirals, and mitigation strategies like school closings. Given the fuzziness of the data about this new virus's behavior, researchers are looking to the past for clues about the seasonality and geography of pandemic flu, the relationship between the new viruses and existing ones, and the behavior of this new H1N1's parent viruses in swine.