The next influenza pademic could claim anywhere from 62 million people or more, with 96 per cent of these deaths occuring from the world’s poorest nations, predicts Harvard University researchers.
Professor Christopher Murray and his team got these figures by extrapolating mortality rates from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and applying the models to the world population of 2004.
At present, only 258 human cases (154 deaths) of bird flu infections have been reported, and so the figures that Murray reports in the Lancet are staggering, to say the least. The poorest nations lack funds, resources and manpower to deal with such a pandemic, plus they are plague with other public health threats such as AIDS, war and famine. If a super-strain of H5N1 breaks out in these countries, then it will not only be hard to control internally but the rate of its spread to outside continents becomes faster. These are only predictions so international efforts to combat the bird flu all the more important for these numbers never to come true.
[News Source:BBC]
[...] using models based on previous flu epidemics. Estimates last December placed the death toll at 62 million worldwide [...]