Scary scenario: Pandemic
Posted 12/22/2004 9:27 PM
By Anita Manning, USA TODAY
Imagine showing up to work one day and finding half your co-workers out sick. Imagine the business world in slow motion, healthy workers overburdened by taking on the jobs of the sick, hospitals overflowing with patients, schools closed and not enough medicine to go around.
That's an apocalyptic vision of what could burst out of a smoldering bird flu outbreak that has spread across Asia, threatening to turn into a global epidemic of flu: a pandemic.
Scientists long have expected another flu pandemic, the kind of wildfire epidemic that emerges every few decades. Nobody knows when it will happen or how bad it could be.
Plans are being made to handle what could be a public health nightmare, but "much of the world is unprepared for a pandemic of any size," the World Health Organization says.
An Institute of Medicine report, "The Threat of Pandemic Influenza," last month estimated that in a worst-case scenario, up to 207,000 people could die of the flu in the USA along with 733,000 hospitalizations and 42 million people treated as outpatients. By comparison, an average flu season claims 36,000 lives and results in 200,000 hospitalizations
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