Thanks to the reader who sent the link to this post on Thrive, a blog at Children’s Hospital Boston. The author is Dr. Aaron Bernstein: A new perspective on preventing an epidemic: How H1N1 compares to SARS and the Nipah virus. Excerpt:
While everyone in Singapore knew of H1N1, it was not the hot topic, despite many cases, it had become in the States. During my stay, the main paper in Singapore ran just one article on H1N1, which informed its readership that the first doses of vaccine wouldn’t arrive for several more weeks.
To my surprise, the Singaporeans I met took this potentially nerve wracking news in stride. One reason this may be is that many Singaporeans may perceive (and rightly so) that H1N1 is, in many ways, no worse than the seasonal influenza virus that comes every year.
Another, and perhaps more compelling reason, though, is that Singaporeans have endured two prior epidemics in the past decade.
In 1998, the first known outbreak with Nipah virus occurred in Malaysia and Singapore infecting 276 people, 105 of whom died. In this and in eight subsequent outbreaks in India and Bangladesh, the virus has earned the grim reputation of being one of the most deadly viruses known, with a mortality rate between 40 and 80 percent. Nipah virus resides in bats (the so-called “reservoir” as bats do not get sick when infected) which may infect pigs, and it is exposure to infected pigs that causes disease in humans.
In 2003, SARS emerged in China and quickly came to Singapore where it infected about as many people (238) as Canada (251) and far more than in all of the United States (27). The SARS virus reservoir is also bats, which transmitted the infection to humans via an intermediate host, the palm civet cat. The mortality rate for SARS is about 6-17%. In comparison, the flu mortality rate is well below 1%.
