What if swine flu actually did turn deadly?

Have you given any serious thought to what it would mean if the current swine flu virus really did change into a modern day killer? I have. In fact, I gave it a LOT of thought after I had finished reading "Survive Pandemic Flu", which you can find by clicking it!

I know that most people think about pandemic flu in only one way: the degree to which it might affect their immediate health, or that of a loved one. The trouble is, while that is an entirely valid way of thinking about the problem, it misses the larger picture.

Back in 1918, when the Spanish Flu, as it was called, began dropping people in their tracks, it put a huge strain not just on individual families, but it threatened to make local communities come apart at the seams. Once it gets to the point that people are too afraid to come within ten feet of one another it becomes very hard to keep the wheels of commerce rolling. All the things you depend on daily as a matter of course suddenly become unreliable and fraught with danger.

The scary thing is that I have not been able to come up with a single solid reason to believe that the same thing could not happen again today. Yes, we have antiviral drugs and vaccine technology on our side, but not enough of them to satisfy demand if they were really called for.

On top of this, not everybody would elect to be vaccinated even if the shots were available. Many people actually consider vaccines more dangerous than the diseases they protect against. While this is not the case, even when the disease causing microbe happens to be as mildly disease causing as the current swine flu pathogen has proved to be (at least initially), the claim is clearly absurd when you start talking about a strain that can kill 5 percent of the population, as was the case back in 1918. The point, of course, is that the vaccine naysayers who forgo the shots still get sick and infect the rest of us, so they are not just a danger to themselves, they contribute to the overall problem.

When you take these people into account, and factor in apathy from the rest of the population, you begin to realize that we may not have advanced sufficiently as a culture to outmaneuver the kind of threat that pandemic influenza still presents.

But really I have only scratched the surface of this complex issue. You can read a fascinating account of the true dimensions of pandemic influenza in Survive Pandemic Flu, which you can find here:

You will also find everything you need to know about how to protect yourself in the event that you do not get access to a protective vaccine, and how to treat someone from home if getting medical treatment becomes impractical in a real crisis situation.