Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
What if 40 percent of the population in Linn County were unable to leave their homes over a period of six to eight weeks?
That’s one of the issues county officials have to consider in preparing for the possibility of a flu pandemic, county Health Educator Ky Weatherford told local businesspeople at the monthly Breakfast Club hosted Thursday, Dec. 7, by the Sweet Home Economic Development Group.
Weatherford, who works for the Linn County Department of Health Services, said that a pandemic of influenza, a global “super-epidemic” of the disease, is anticipated by health officials.
“It’s not a question of ‘if,'” she said. “It’s a question of ‘when.'”
She noted that three pandemics affected the United States in the last century, the most severe being the 1918 Spanish influenza outbreak that killed at least half a million in the U.S. and an estimated 40 million worldwide.
“AIDS has killed 25 million in 25 years,” she said. “The Spanish influenza killed 25 million in 25 weeks.”
The others were the 1957 flu pandemic that killed at least 70,000 in the United States and 1 to 2 million worldwide, and the 1968 Hong Kong flu that caused about 34,000 deaths in the U.S. and three-quarters of a million worldwide.
“Pandemics have occurred periodically throughout history,” she said.
The latest threat, avian or bird flu, has infected 258 people worldwide – none in the United States yet – and killed 154, nearly all of them in Asia.
“That isn’t the same thing as a pandemic flu, though people think so,” she said.
Though there has been only one case of transmission from one human