Flu pandemic can kill millions in subcontinent: study
By Our Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Dec 22: The subcontinent would be among the worst affected if a flu pandemic was to breakout in the world today, says a US study.
The researchers based their estimates on the data from the 1918-20 pandemic which killed as many as 50 million people.
An analysis of the 1918-20 pandemic showed that the calamity killed an astonishing 4.4 per cent of the population in the undivided India.
Even within India there was a huge variation by province, for instance for the Central Provinces and Berar the figure was over 7 per cent.
“About 1 per cent on average of the world’s population dies every year. So for India, during the pandemic of 1918-20, the annual mortality went up fourfold,” said Prof Chris Murray of the Harvard Initiative for Global Health, who led the study.
The developed world fared much better. In Denmark, the death toll from the 1918-20 pandemic was as low as 0.2 percent of the population.
The study, published in the world’s leading medical journal, The Lancet, warned that another pandemic could kill as many as 33 million people in Asia and an estimated 18 million people in Africa.
The final estimates of such a pandemic range from 51 to 81 million deaths worldwide, with a median, or mid-range estimate of 62 million. The researchers also estimated that 96 per cent of these deaths would be in the poorer countries.
Two factors contribute to this. Since 1918-20 the developed countries have become richer, thus increasing their socioeconomic status in the “model”. And the second reason is the younger age profile of the less developed world.
Earlier estimates of another flu outbreak ranged from 50 to 100 million to as many as 1 billion deaths worldwide, but nobody had yet made a systematic attempt to quantify it.
Victims of a flu pandemic would be mostly aged from 15 to 29 years, followed by those under 14 years and from 30 to 44 years old, the study found. Deaths would be slightly higher among males. If all the fatalities forecast occur in a single year, worldwide deaths would more than double.
“If something along the lines of the 1918 scenario played out again, the impact would be devastating in the developing world and major, if not catastrophic, in the developed world,” said Kenneth Hill, a co-author of the study and a visiting professor at the Harvard Centre for Population and Development Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Since the brunt of the disease would be in the developing world, it’s where planning ought to be focused,” Prof Hill said. “But, of course, it’s where the resources don’t exist to plan for such an event.”
The researchers analysed vital statistics from 27 countries, 24 US states and nine Indian provinces from 1915 to 1923 and extrapolated the findings to population data from 2004. It excluded data from countries where World War I or civil wars were known to have led to more deaths in the time period studied.
Among the factors that might affect the number of deaths from an influenza pandemic today are the 35 million people worldwide whose immune systems have been weakened by HIV, Neil Ferguson of Imperial College in London wrote in an accompanying comment. The potential roles of HIV, malaria and malnutrition in a pandemic need to be further studied, he wrote.
Other experts have already warned that wealthier countries were better prepared for a possible influenza pandemic and that poorer ones would be less likely to have access to vaccines and antiviral drugs.
Health officials are tracking the spread of the H5N1 virus that causes avian influenza in case it spawns the next pandemic. The virus has infected 258 people and killed 154 of them since late 2003, according to the WHO.
