But a flu epidemic does not stand for that Pestilence , everyone ’s favourite Horseman of the Apocalypse , has ridden into townspeople on his snowy horse and is busily cut down healthy humanity like so much gage .
Many of those influenza epidemic case can be balmy , especially if grab early on enough to handle with an antiviral like Tamiflu , or are deadly predominantly to the aged , very young nestling , or individuals with already compromise immune systems .
A “flu pandemic,“ however, does mean that Pestilence has moved in and is setting up shop. A flu pandemic has two main characteristics: That it’s a new strain of the virus, meaning that few people, if any, have resistance to it, and that it’s managed to work its way to more than one continent.
For those reason , a flu pandemic can be passing deadly . The World Health Organization has define six stages of progression leading to a pandemic flu : Phases 1 through 3 see largely fauna contagion , with minimal human sickness ; Phase 4 is get human infection ; Phase 5 is human - to - human contact in at least two regions ; and Phase 6 is pandemic , with widespread human infection . Right now , with this current bust of swine grippe , we’re at Phase 3 , where the grippe is causing sporadic outbreaks in modified field " “ mean thing are n’t too bad.we’re at Phase 4 .
" special transmission under such restricted circumstances does not indicate that the virus has win the story of transmissibility among humankind necessary to cause a pandemic,“ articulate WHO . Moreover , we ’ve been at Phase 3 before , in the recent past tense , and Flu pandemics have actually occurred about three times every century since the 1500s . But with globalization having exploded in the years since the last one , a grippe pandemic now has to the potential to wipe out 2 to 7.4 million the great unwashed worldwide , according to WHO .
( If you want to take your mind off that scarey sentence , lease ’s talk etymology . The word " epidemic" was first used by the poet Homer , the Hellenic preposition " epi,“ meaning " on,“ married to " demos,“ the noun for " people,“ meaning something like hall , or living in one ’s country . It later took on its aesculapian meaning after Hippocrates apply the word as the statute title of one of his aesculapian treatises . For for a while , epidemic was a handle give to any collection of symptoms , from looseness of the bowels to febrility , that affect a single country over a discrete period of time , but after the Middle Ages and the epidemic of the plague , it came to mean the outbreak a single , set disease in an area . )
