# 3169
You don’t have to be a virologist, only slightly cognizant of history, to know that all pandemics aren’t created equal.
In the last century we saw three full-blown influenza pandemics, but only one was considered truly severe. That was the 1918 pandemic, which killed (and estimates vary) somewhere between 40 and 100 million people.
The 1957 pandemic was much less severe, in terms of fatalities, with somewhere between 2 and 4 million estimated deaths.
The 1968 pandemic was milder still.
Recognizing pandemics come in all shapes and sizes, the HHS created a pandemic severity scale more than 2 years ago, much like the one used for hurricanes, to quantify the impact of a pandemic here in the United States.
Pandemics are rated like Hurricanes. Category 1-5
The 1918 Spanish Flu was a CAT 5 Pandemic
The World Health Organization has now decided that they too need some way to categorize a pandemic’s severity.
WHO working on pandemic severity scale
Updated Mon. May. 11 2009 1:44 PM ET
The Canadian Press
TORONTO -- The World Health Organization is working on a way to grade the severity of a pandemic threat.
Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the agency's flu chief, says the experts who helped the WHO devise its pandemic alert scale are also working on a way to communicate possible severity.
The WHO has faced criticism from some quarters that its pandemic alert scale has no mechanism to reflect the fact that a flu pandemic might cause mild, moderate or severe illness and trigger varying degrees of societal disruption.
The WHO says having a way to gauge possible severity would help countries decide on which response measures to adopt.
Fukuda says he expects the new severity gauge will be ready for use soon
I suppose it would be too much to hope that everyone uses the same scale . . .
