New viruses are one of the more prominent threats that mankind faces. With the H7N9 flu virus now spreading by human-to-human transmission, and the MERS Coronavirus spreading in the middle east and having a 50% mortality rate, it’s becoming increasingly possible for the contagion to spread across the globe.
With viruses continuously evolving, as we have seen with H7N9 jumping from animals to humans, we could literally be just a mutation away from a crisis similar to what the world saw during the H1N1 Spanish Flu variant pandemic of 1918, which infected half a billion people and killed an estimated 5% of the world’s population..
Full Spectrum Survival interviews leading infectious disease expert Dr. Ian MacKay of Virology Down Under to discuss the possibility of these viruses becoming a global pandemic.
We don’t know a lot of things, including what the host is for this virus. Where it came from – has it come from animals… we really don’t know.
We don’t know how these patients are getting the virus; if it is from an animal and what sort of contact they’re having. We don’t know how well it transmits from patient to patient.
We also don’t know much about the variation of the virus. At the moment it doesn’t seem to be very well spread between people, but that may change as the virus evolves as it infects more people.
