Vital Systems Security

The novel H1N1 virus has been elected the “virus of the year.” According to the journal Science, the pandemic was a “near miss.” As the authors of the short piece argue, the “H1N1 virus was less virulent than feared, but the next pandemic could be worse.” Prepare for the next pandemic is the message.

What kind of work is the trope of the Next Pandemic doing? Might it not be worth investigating the current pandemic first, before we jump to the next? Before we orient ourselves towards the near future, it might be necessary to first inhabit the recent past in some meaningful way. What, in fact, has just happened? Apparently, it is easier for experts to take responsibility for the future than for the past.

Just to remind ourselves:

1. Most experts predicted the emergence of an H5 virus. It was an H1 virus.

2. Most experts predicted that the pandemic would start off in South-East Asia. It turned out to be closer to home.

3. Most experts predicted that it would be a devastating event. WHO now calls it a “moderate” pandemic.

4. Most experts predicted serious consequences for critical infrastructure.

Good luck with the next predictions! Trust your expert!

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Behemoth – A peer-reviewed journal published by the Akademie Verlag, Berlin

Special Issue: Epidemic Orders

In the past few years, epidemic events, both actual and virtual, have made a spectacular comeback. Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases such as avian and swine flu have generated great anxiety the world over, resulting in a pervasive sense of vulnerability, insecurity, and uncertainty. A powerful spirit of urgency, based on a genuine concern for human health and well-being, overdetermined by a variety of scientific, political, and economic interests, engendered a real flurry of action. In the epic battle against germs, the biopolitical state mobilized material and symbolic resources at an unprecedented scale.

In the shadow of the emerging infectious disease threat, significant shifts in public health, medical care, and scientific research have occurred. The aim of this special issue of Behemoth is to offer an initial set of diagnostic accounts. What are the domains in which fundamental shifts have occurred over the past few years? Who are the actors involved and what are the underlying logics animating these shifts in public health, medical care, and scientific research? The key aim of this issue is to draw analytic attention to recent reconfigurations and to identify the kind of epidemic orders that are taking shape today at the heart of the biopolitical state.

Please send abstracts for this special issue of Behemoth to the editor Carlo Caduff (carlocaduff@access.uzh.ch) and to Kathrin Franke (behemoth@rz.uni-leipzig.de). Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30 January 2010. Deadline for submission of articles: 30 June 2010.

A World Health Organization official today signaled that the agency is stepping back from plans to develop a way to grade pandemic severity, because its experts believe severity will vary from place to place, making the development of a severity index difficult and its use impractical.

A new study on the swine flu virus by Neil Ferguson and his colleagues, published in Science, has shown that transmissibility of the swine flu virus is substantially higher than seasonal flu and comparable with lower estimates of R0 obtained from previous pandemics. The reproduction number (Ro), defined as the number of cases one case generates on average, is a key measure of transmissibility.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1176062

… no good news today. Not avian flu, but swine flu … !

New, deadly swine flu hits Mexico

By Noel Randewich and Armando Tovar
Reuters
Friday, April 24, 2009 11:30 AM

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A deadly strain of swine flu never seen before has broken out in Mexico, killing at least 16 people and raising fears it is spreading across North America.

The World Health Organization said it was concerned about what it called 800 “influenza-like” cases in Mexico, and also about a confirmed outbreak of a new strain of swine flu in the United States.

Mexico canceled classes for millions of children in its sprawling capital city and surrounding areas on Friday after authorities noticed a higher number of deaths involving flu-like illness than normal in recent weeks.

“It is a virus that mutated from pigs and then at some point was transmitted to humans,” Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova told the Televisa network.

He linked the disease in Mexico to a new kind of swine flu that struck seven people in California and Texas.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the virus in the United States was a never-before-seen mixture of viruses typical among pigs, birds and humans. All seven American patients have recovered.

The Mexican government warned people not to shake hands or kiss when greeting or share food, glasses or cutlery for fear of contracting the flu.

Mexico City, one of the world’s biggest cities and home to some 20 million people, was quieter than usual on Friday morning. Normally choking traffic was less chaotic in the absence of school buses and parents driving kids to school.

Many people waiting to enter subway stations had their faces covered with surgical masks.

The virus is an influenza A virus, carrying the designation H1N1. It contains DNA typical to avian, swine and human viruses, including elements from European and Asian swine viruses, the CDC has said.

WHO said about 60 people in Mexico have died from the disease. The Geneva-based U.N. agency said it was in daily contact with U.S., Canadian and Mexican authorities and had activated its Strategic Health Operations Center (SHOC) — its command and control center for acute public health events.

Surveillance for and scrutiny of influenza has been stepped up since 2003, when H5N1 bird flu reappeared in Asia. Experts fear this strain, or another strain, could spark a pandemic that could kill millions.

(Additional reporting by Maggie Fox in Washington and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Frances Kerry, Editing by Eric Walsh)

Researchers have discovered antibodies that may make possible an influenza vaccine capable of preventing many or all strains. So far, research has only shown effectiveness against H5 and H1 strains, but the basic technique (involving an attack on the ‘neck’ of the Hemagluttin spike rather than its ‘tip’) gives it a much more generic capacity (because the ‘tip’ mutates much more rapidly than the so-called ‘neck’) than traditional vaccines. Some researchers indicated that this discovery opens up possibility for creating powerful vaccines against a range of “rapidly mutating pathogens”.  What  do the flu experts think?

An article in today’s New York Time’s announces the release of Google Flu Trends, a tool developed by the philanthropy wing Google.org. Google Flu Trends tracks a specified set of search terms for “ebbs and flows”, broken down geographically by regions and states. Monitored search terms include “flu symptoms” and “muscle aches” (A complete list of monitored terms does not seem to be publicly available, perhaps because of the possibility of manipulation). Read the rest of this entry »

DemfromCT — a blogger on DailyKos — has another interesting post on school closure and pandemic preparedness. It is about many things, among more information on exercises that show that in the US school closure may not be in time to help much, and an interesting comparison with a recent minor outbreak in Hong Kong, where, apparently, parents held students home from school in a “precautionary” fashion before a decision was taken to close schools. Also interesting is the mention of the role that blogs and the internet more generally would play in a pandemic.

The special issue of Interfaces journal from 2006 was entitled: Homeland Security: Operations Research Initiatives and Applications. You might find some of the papers interesting, since they touch on broad range of topics discussed on this blog. Some of the topics are bio-security/terrorism, emergency response and critical infrastructures. The article number 6 is especially interesting, since the author starts by drawing a direct link between homeland security and the genealogy of operations research expertise that we have been tracing in OEP research.

Despite recent spikes in H5N1 avian influenza activity in humans and birds, there have been fewer bird outbreaks in fewer countries this year [2007] than in 2006, according to a preliminary report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Read the rest of this entry »