2009-05-06T11:35:00.000-07:00

**What is at risk and what are the symptoms?**
By: JEREMY LAURANCE
Published: 3/05/2009 at 10:10 AM

Q: What is swine flu?
A: Much the same as human flu— but in pigs. The worry is that pigs are excellent hosts for the virus. And because they are genetically close to humans, they can pass the virus to us more easily than birds can. The great fear over the past decade has been that the avian flu virus, H5N1, would infect pigs which would act as a reservoir for its transmission to humans.

Q: How worried should we be?
A: At this stage, no one knows. The virus that has caused the outbreak is a strain of theH1N1type that contains bird, pig and human genes in a combination never seen before. Immunity to it will thus be limited. Scientists are working to establish the precise nature of the virus, the symptoms it causes and its capacity to cause disease and death.

Q: What are the symptoms of swine flu?
A: Similar to ordinary human flu— cough, sudden fever, headache, muscle pains. In severe cases, it may lead to pneumonia, multi-organ failure and death. The incubation period for ordinary human flu is two to five days.

Q: Who is at greatest risk?
A: In Mexico, the virus appears to be targeting those ages 20 to 40. This is not unusual – the same occurred during the worst pandemic of the last century, in 1918, when 20 to 40 million died. In the US, the virus appears to be targeting children who are suffering only mild illness.

Q: Is it safe to eat pork?
A: Yes. Cooking destroys the virus. [The World Health Organization and other organizations have been under pressure from pork lobbies to assure the public that food from pigs poses no risk.]

**Watching nervously**
Apr 30th 2009 LONDON, MEXICO CITY AND NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

A new influenza virus is spreading across the globe.
The football stadiums, restaurants and churches of Mexico City are empty, and the latest must-have fashion accessory is the cubreboca[musk]. Though the army was dispatched to hand out millions of these face masks free, supplies in pharmacies are almost exhausted and people have been outraged. Whenever someone sneezes or coughs, those nearby try to walk away as fast as they can without being rude.

Which, in a sense, he might. As the world now knows, Mexico was the first country affected by a new and deadly strain of influenza that has leapt the species barrier from pigs to people. The first, but not the last. 2,500 Mexicans were known to have symptoms that looked like the result of this new virus, and more than 170 had died of them, though only eight of the dead were confirmed carriers of the new virus. That virus has now turned up in 12 other countries on four continents, and the deaths have begun beyond Mexico’s borders, starting with a baby in Texas.[Édgar Enrique Hernández fall sick with the flu and recovered from the virus] This could be the beginning of an influenza pandemic.

Those precautions, though, are now looking wise. For on April 29th the World Health Organization (WHO) promoted the new disease to level five of its six-level pandemic alert. Some countries have built up stocks of antiviral drugs over the past few years. Luckily, they seem to work against the new strain. Vigilance at borders is being redoubled. China and Russia have started quarantining visitors with suspicious symptoms. Asian airports have dusted off heat-sensing equipment they had installed after earlier scares caused by cases of avian flu and SARS, to detect sick incoming passengers.

The snag is that the world’s capacity to create a vaccine against pandemic influenza is based on the smaller amounts needed to fight seasonal flu. The capital-intensive approach used to make flu vaccines is expensive, slow and not easily expanded to accommodate new variants or altogether new viruses.

**The butcher's bill**
Apr 30th 2009 LONDON AND MEXICO CITYFrom The Economist print edition
Recession may dampen the economic cost of a swine-flu epidemic

The scares over bird flu since 1997 and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 have spurred research into the economic costs of pandemics. Studies paint a grim picture of what swine flu could mean for the world economy. For example, World Bank economists estimated last year that a pandemic with death rates similar to those in the Spanish flu that swept the world in 1918-19 could shrink global GDP by 4.8%.

Although such research can help to identify the economic effects of swine flu, global recession means that some of the mechanisms it describes are already at work. The recession means, perhaps counter intuitively, that the incremental economic effect of a pandemic may be less dramatic than it would be in normal times.

Economists argue that a pandemic would affect both global demand and global supply, but that the first of these is particularly vulnerable to the uncertainty and fear surrounding even the possibility of widespread disease. That would cause consumer spending to fall and businesses to put investment plans on hold.

This outbreak has happened when, worldwide, consumer confidence is low. So any further drops in demand because of a swine-flu pandemic may be smaller than those caused by SARS, when airline-passenger arrivals in Hong Kong fell by nearly two-thirds in a month. But a pandemic would dent hopes of a rapid recovery from recession, by providing yet another reason for gloom to continue.

The uncertainty caused by a pandemic could hit investment too. Risk premiums for countries affected by the pandemic might rise. And worries about safety, justified or not, pose risks to trade. Already, China has banned Mexican pork, though there is no evidence to suggest that meat spreads flu viruses. World trade is already plummeting. Widespread reactions of this sort could steepen its dive.

**My reaction**

1. Stocks have declined around the world and the U.S. economy will keep shrinking.
2. The outbreak of swine flu in Mexico is a concerning development for the global economy.
3. Swine flu is cutting through the markets creating uncertainty in its wake.
4. A global outbreak of deadly flu would seriously diminish economic activity.
5. The spread of virus could harm trade and tourism and wreck businesses.
6. Airline and tourism shares are hit by the swine flu worries.
7. The financial and economic costs of the outbreak will eventually depend on its severity.

**Conclusion**

A business that has learned the lessons of previous outbreaks – the avian flu crises in 1997 and 2004 and the outbreak oppressive serious respiratory syndrome in 2003 – is better prepared this time around, while improved communication on the progress of the disease means people are less tended to panic. Now is the time to prepare for the real. Therefore, to put the antiviral factories on extra time immediately, and try to improve, manufacture and distribute a vaccine. A drill today will help to spare millions of lives in the future.

Pawita Chitwiset