It is time to start preparing for the possibility of a serious flu pandemic during the coming winter flu season. Here is what the experts are thinking and worrying about:
“Hundreds of specialists from 40 countries meeting at a posh beach side resort in this tourist mecca were plotting strategies for what many dread could become an outbreak rivaling a 1918 flu pandemic that killed tens of millions of people.
Health officials in the United States, Mexico and Canada fear that a strengthened virus will return north with the winter cold. And the United Kingdom’s health minister warned this week that the flu could strike as many as 100,000 Britons a day by the end of August.
“We need to plan for the most extreme scenarios as well as for the likely scenarios,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Influenza is perhaps the most unpredictable of infectious diseases.”
the experts