Health disaster ‘inevitable’
It is not ‘‘if’’ but ‘‘when’’ New Zealand is hit by another serious health disaster like the worldwide flu pandemic of 100 years ago, says a leading expert.
‘‘The impact of a new flu virus could be catastrophic if there are no vaccines to deal with it,’’ said Professor Geoffrey Rice, Canterbury academic and specialist author on the subject. ‘‘That would be 1918 all over again.’’
The deaths of about 9000 people in New Zealand in 1918’s ‘‘Spanish flu’’ pandemic were commemorated at a ceremony in Wellington’s Karori Cemetery yesterday.
Most died over two months. About 30,000 would die in a similar-scale pandemic today, said Rice.
Recent outbreaks of ‘‘ordinary’’ flu in New Zealand, which filled a third of Wellington Hospital’s intensive care unit with serious cases in September, have focused attention on the commemoration and whether the world’s worst pandemic since the 14th century Black Death could be repeated.
Yesterday’s ceremony marked New Zealand’s worst month of the pandemic a century ago.
In Wellington, 63 people died on November 18. The city had more than 730 flu victims, 660 of whom lie in Karori Cemetery.
About half New Zealand’s population got the flu, and in some smaller communities, 90 per cent of people caught it.
Rice said another worldwide flu epidemic was inevitable.
‘‘Experts at the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, which maintains the worldwide influenza surveillance network, are all agreed that another influenza pandemic is overdue.’’
A ‘‘perfect mixing bowl’’ for the transmission of viruses was occurring as millions of people travelled the world in passenger jets and were packed into halls waiting to pass through security.
‘‘A new flu virus could be distributed right around the globe within two or three days,’’ he said.
Drastic action by WHO in 1997 had only just contained a new strain, the A/H5N1 ‘‘bird flu’’, in Hong Kong.
Many people were admitted to hospital with severe flu symptoms apparently caught from chickens.
The big fear, however, was that such a virus would go on to be transmitted from human to human.
Fears of 1918 ‘‘all over again’’ were why Rice said he had been telling the Ministry of Health to educate the public about nursing pneumonia cases at home.
‘‘At least we have antibiotics, and they assure me that New Zealand has ample stocks of antibiotics in reserve.’’
The biggest threat was from the A/H9N2 Chinese flu, which had been smouldering in China and Taiwan since 2016, Rice said.
Risks were still high, because influenza was endemic in migratory wild birds, and human flu pandemics had all been caused by an avian flu strain ‘‘jumping species’’ into humans.
Developing new vaccines was a slow process because they were grown in fertilised chicken eggs, which took about six months to go into mass production. New techniques were being developed to bypass that process, but had yet to be perfected or tested.
Rice said lessons from 1918 could still be useful, although the circumstances could be very different – the flu was then mainly spread by soldiers returning on ships from World War I. New Zealand now has a comprehensive influenza pandemic plan, incorporating a ‘‘whole of government’’ response.
While health services and governments were better organised, a pandemic would still probably overwhelm hospitals and ambulance services very quickly.