Wired Magazine recently asked some "Big Questions" in the cover story. This is one of them.
Details:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/bigquestions.html?pg=3#diseases
2007-03-16 05:05:01 · 3 answers · asked by Rafe Furst 1 in Health ➔ Diseases & Conditions ➔ Infectious Diseases
Because the disease spreads fast while working to find a cure is very slow. Have you seen the projections on what will happen with the bird flu it is some scary stuff.
2007-03-16 05:09:48 · answer #1 · answered by romettifamily 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
pandemics occure when the majority of the population have no immunity against a disease process that comes up. Most of us have immunity against things like measles and mumps etc because we are by law immunized at birth, but occasionally a bacterium or a virus mutate rapidly into something we have no immunity from, it then will spread rapidly and kill a great many people before it runs it's course.
Google the influenza pandemic of 1918, it will give you a sample of what a pandemic is like.
2007-03-16 12:14:20 · answer #2 · answered by essentiallysolo 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Three things need to happen for a disease to become a pandemic.
The first is that it must be a illness that will make people ill.
It must be very contagious - a illness that few people have had before.
And it must spread across wide areas of the globe.
Unfortunately H5N1 avian influenza looks as though it may very well fill all of those criteria very soon.
2007-03-18 18:25:27 · answer #3 · answered by starlight 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋