In a new article, SciDev.Net points out that important lessons were learned during the recently ended H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic. While no one knows how many cases there were in the official WHO pandemic, nor how many died, it clearly was less severe than had been feared. The lessons learned, according to SciDev.Net, included how to manage flu monitoring systems well and the advantage of lab analysis of only a sample of the flu cases for public health purposes. Some countries clearly over reacted to the problem posed by H1N1, and some failed to use most of the vaccines that they had purchased.
One of the major advances that people had called for is the use of cell culture as the medium for producing flu vaccines. In the past flu vaccines have been produced commercially in fertilized chicken eggs, a process that causes delays both in building the flocks of cocks and hens to produce the eggs and in the growth of the virus in the eggs. Last year it was announced that a major plant for the (faster) production of virus using cell culture was started by a public-private partnership in the United States.
Flu pandemics are known to have occurred occasionally over the past couple of centuries whenever a new strain appeared that was both easily communicated and for which there was little previous immunity in the global population. Typically these strains evolve in an animal population and make the jump into humans. It seems very probable that such events will occur in the future and lead to new pandemics, and the way to deal with the threat is to promptly identify the strain when it begins to infect people, to develop an appropriate vaccine promptly, and to rapidly immunize people with a good immunization strategy, while using other appropriate measures to control the spread of the disease. We are better able to do so now!
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