Since the flu is a dangerous but easily preventable disease, it should receive much more attention from the public health community, Dr. Stephen Morse told an engaged crowd in the Aidekman Center for the Performing Arts last night.
"Influenza is one of the most common and transmissible infections," Morse said. In a normal year for the flu, thousands of people die from a disease "preventable with a vaccine," he said.
Morse is the principal investigator and director of the Columbia University's Center for Public Health Preparedness (CPHP), a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) established in October of 2000.
Morse works with the CPHP to create a public health workforce to deal with epidemics, bioterrorism and infectious diseases.
"Where's My Flu Vaccine?" was the title of yesterday's lecture, as well as the question Morse addressed. "We'll be talking about influenza, but we won't hand out samples," Morse said in jest.
The lecture, sponsored in part by Public Health at Tufts (PHAT), was intended to increase awareness of the effects of influenza, a potentially lethal virus that is too common to strike fear into the heart of the public.
Influenza is characterized by chills, fever, headache, muscle aches, sore throat and a dry cough. The flu affects mostly children and the elderly as well as those with people with compromised immune systems, and can be deadly.
"Its incubation period is just a couple of days," Morse said, which makes the elderly and children the most vulnerable to infection. "People are infectious a few days after they're infected, quickly reproducing the virus," he said.
The flu's scattering effect is tracked by several organizations, including the World Health Organization, which has approximately 75 labs taking samples from infected people and following regional strains of the virus.
The U.S. Influenza Sentinel Physicians Surveillance, made up of a group of doctors, is another organization that studies influenza by taking the percentage of doctor's office visits with influenza-like illnesses, as reported by each doctor.
An estimated 30,000 people die from the flu every year, though "we don't know, nobody knows the exact number," Morse said.
He said influenza is such a serious public health problem because it is infectious, quick to spread, and deadly. "The problem with the flu is that most people who get symptoms related to the virus don't go to their doctors expecting to get better," Morse said.
An estimated 36,000 deaths per flu season between 1990 and 1999 were attributed to the flu. Last year was not a good year for the flu, according to Morse. "A good year," Morse said, "is less than 10 percent infection rate."
Morse said that his work is focused on surveillance and early warning to avoid epidemics, as well as pandemics, which are widespread epidemics that affect a large portion of the world's population.
"Additional to surveillance is public education as a major concern of [epidemiologists]," Morse said. According to Morse, public health education is underrated and can save thousands of lives.<$>
