The following article on TIME talks about the lessons learned from the HINI pandemic and provides an interesting perspective on the government and media reactions to the H1N1 flu pandemic and the way forward.
Abstract: It’s been a year since H1N1. In April 2009, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) discovered that two children in California had been infected with a new strain of influenza virus — originally dubbed "swine flu" but eventually known as H1N1 . Even Mexican health officials grappled with major outbreaks of a new flulike illness. By the end of the month, with new cases popping up in New York City, Canada and Europe, officials had come to realize they had a global emergency on their hands.
On April 27, 2009, World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Margaret Chan announced that the agency would raise the global flu pandemic alert level from 4 to 5 — the first concrete step toward acknowledging that the world was caught in the grip of its first new pandemic in more than four decades.
Within weeks, the H1N1 virus was spreading around the world, and by June the WHO had raised the alert level again, officially declaring influenza pandemic. Since most people had no immune protection against the H1N1 virus, it spread rapidly.
From the start, the vast majority of H1N1 cases seemed relatively mild, then governments around the world started drawing up hasty plans to fend off a potential "second wave" of H1N1, which they feared could turn into a public-health disaster.
Yet catastrophe never came, and the total U.S. death toll from H1N1 — about 13,000 people over the past year — was considerably smaller than the 36,000 people who are estimated to die each year from the regular, seasonal flu.
Millions of doses of H1N1 vaccine expired unused on doctors' shelves, and health officials are now under fire for overhyping what eventually seemed like a harmless bug. So, was H1N1 much ado about nothing?
The main concern going forward should not be the way health officials responded to the last pandemic but how we will respond to the next one!
The perception that officials overhyped and overreacted to the H1N1 pandemic may make the public less inclined to react appropriately the next time around. The only way to defuse public skepticism is for health officials to communicate better what they know about an outbreak — and even more important, what they don't know about it. Washington officials did an admirable job putting out information in the early days of the H1N1 pandemic, but they were less successful at putting that information in context. There wasn't enough explanation of what a "pandemic" really meant: that it referred only to the transmissibility of the new virus, not its virulence.
Leaving interpretation of the data to the media, whose coverage tends to swing between extremes, is not a good idea. In an age of Twitter and transparency, there's no substitute for official honesty. "Communication in 2010 is a really tricky situation," says Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. "This was the first pandemic done in the age of the Internet." Chances are it won't be the last — but if we learn from H1N1, at least we'll be prepared.
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