Virus Proof Protocol Review
The second lesson is that we must Virus Proof Protocol Review place more reliance on past experience. There was an H1N1 outbreak in America in 1976 which was hopelessly bungled by Gerald Ford's administration, and as a result is now referred to as 'the swine flu fiasco'?
A national immunization campaign was introduced which had to be cancelled after a few months when it was found that the virus had killed only one person, while the side effects of the vaccine had caused twenty-five deaths. Are we doomed to repeat this error? The third, and most important, lesson is that governments should not take on the responsibility of handling disease outbreaks.
This should be left to doctors with specialist knowledge of public health care. Earlier this year we made this recommendation in a posting entitled 'Swine flu: to be or not to be?' Those of you who read it, and it's still in the archive, will probably remember that we accused successive British governments of showing a total inability to comprehend and manage outbreaks of infectious diseases, as witness their handling of the vCJD 'mad cow' disease and the SARS coronavirus outbreak.
'Now we're faced with the threat of a pandemic of H1N1 swine flu, and the government is reacting once again with the mindless frenzy of a headless chicken,' we wrote. We looked back to the US outbreak in 1976, which ended several years later when the US Secretary of Health was forced to make a public apology, admitting that as a layman he'd found enormous difficulty in making 'sound, balanced judgments about complex, scientifically-based public health issues.' This in future should never be part of the government remit.
