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Mayrn McKenna, one of the best feature writers on avian flu, has a look back at the initial outbreak of H5N1 in Hong Kong in 1997, with remembrances of those who were involved.
It makes for fascinating reading.
Players in H5N1's debut ponder a decade's lessons
Maryn McKenna
Contributing Writer
Dec 14, 2007 (CIDRAP News) – Dr. Keiji Fukuda still remembers the intense emotions that tumbled through his mind as he waited to board his hastily scheduled flight out of Atlanta. His destination was Asia. In Hong Kong, a newly identified avian influenza virus, recently dubbed H5N1, was making people desperately ill.
His objective was not the first-ever case of H5N1 in humans; that had surfaced 8 months earlier, killing a 3-year-old child. Instead, the focus of his emergency trip was the second and third cases, soon to grow to 18. The new illnesses were the signal that international health authorities had been dreading since that first case: evidence that the new flu's ability to sicken and kill humans was not a mysterious anomaly but a true and sustained threat.
"After the first case, there were a lot of questions, because there had never been any H5 infections in humans before," Fukuda said recently. "But once we had a second case, there were no more thoughts of lab contamination or error. The potential implications of an outbreak were immediately apparent."
He came to that realization somewhere over the Atlantic, 10 years ago this month. December 2007 marks the 10th anniversary of the revelation that a potentially pandemic strain of flu had emerged for the first time in years, and of the start of unprecedented scientific cooperation and commercial expansion—and political disagreement.
To mark the occasion, CIDRAP News asked some of the key players in the 1997 emergency response to recall their reactions as the Hong Kong outbreak developed and to reflect on the weaknesses H5N1 exposed in public health and medicine, as well as the unexpected gifts it brought.
