Swine flu: Can science save us from the second wave?
Flu pandemics historically come in waves, often getting worse as they go.
The deadly one of 1918, which was also the last H1N1 pandemic, did just that.
“So did pandemics in 1890, 1847, 1781 and others,” says Lone Simonsen of George Washington University in Washington DC, who has studied the progress of the 1918 pandemic.
The 1918 flu started with a mild wave in March, followed by a deadly second wave later in the year.
For the 2009 virus to follow the same path, two things need to happen: the virus has to spread readily enough in humans that it does not fizzle out, and it needs to mutate to a nastier form capable of killing more people.
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A big wake-up call came in the 2007-08 flu season when several strains of H1N1 evolved resistance to Tamiflu. Arnold Monto, an influenza specialist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says that tests had wrongly suggested that oseltamivir-resistant viruses would be crippled and unlikely to spread widely in humans.
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