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0:00
Hello, and
welcome to this lecture entitled
"Responding To Pandemic Influenza."
My name is Jonathan Van-Tam.
I'm a Professor of Health Protection
at the University of Nottingham.
For this lecture, I shall
be joined by my colleague
from NHS England, Dr.
Chloe Sellwood, who
will introduce
herself in due course.
Hello.
My name is Dr. Chloe Sellwood,
and I'm the Pandemic Influenza
Resilience Manager for NHS England.
Now,
this is the second lecture
in a short pandemic series, and
it focuses, rather than on what
pandemics are, about how,
in terms of public health,
we respond to them.
So it's a good idea to have
listened to the first lecture
and studied the
material to go with it
or potentially to have done your
own reading about what influenza
pandemics are, how they're formed,
and their main characteristics.
You will really need
this kind of background
to get the most out of
this second lecture.
1:10
To begin with, let's remind
ourselves just a little bit
about the characteristics
of pandemic influenza.
Remember that these are
repetitive phenomena.
But in terms of when
they're going to occur,
we really just can't predict
at all when that will be,
and we can't predict
how severe they will be.
They could be no more severe
than a winter epidemic,
but they could, on
the other hand, be
incredibly severe, as
was the case in 1918.
But we can say that there are
recurrent features of influenza
A viruses, and as long as we
have influenza A in circulation,
the possibility of pandemics
will always be there.
In human history so far, we can only
say that the subtypes of influenza
A, H1, H2, and H3, are the
ones that have caused pandemics,
but we simply can't rule out the
very large variety of influenza
A viruses that exist in the
animal kingdom, particularly
in the natural reservoir,
wild water birds.
And if you think about
the recent history,
you would, like me, be concerned
about the potential pandemic threat
from H5N1, and also, and very
recently, the threat from H7N9
in China.
And it's these kind of concerns
that drive our continued vigilance
and the need to prepare
for pandemic influenza
and to be ready to respond
in an appropriate way.
