Health officials around the world have been gearing up in recent
years for pandemic flu – a global outbreak of flu caused by a
new type of virus that people have not been exposed to before or
have not been exposed to in a long time. The virus would spread
quickly around the world because people are not immune to it.
Pandemics pop up periodically – most recently in 1918, 1957 and
1968 – and they can be very dangerous, especially for people
with asthma, COPD and other respiratory conditions. In June, the
World Health Organization (WHO) declared that Novel H1N1
influenza [link to our H1N1 page] (originally called “swine
flu”) had become pandemic. So far, this virus has not been as
serious a threat to health as was originally feared, but it is
spreading quickly. Some health experts fear it will mutate into
a more serious disease. The World Health Organization says a
pandemic flu can encircle the globe within three months. How
long it takes to infect a community – and how long it stays – is
impossible to estimate.