The Next Pandemic?

A special section in the July/August 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs.  POSTED MAY 25, 2005.

Probable Cause
by Laurie Garrett

Since it first emerged in 1997, avian influenza has become deadlier and more resilient. It has infected 109 people and killed 59 of them. If the virus becomes capable of human-to-human transmission and retains its extraordinary potency, humanity could face a pandemic unlike any ever witnessed.
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Preparing for the Next Pandemic
by Michael T. Osterholm

If an influenza pandemic struck today, borders would close, the global economy would shut down, international vaccine supplies and health-care systems would be overwhelmed, and panic would reign. To limit the fallout, the industrialized world must create a detailed response strategy involving the public and private sectors.
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Q&A with Laurie Garrett

Laurie Garrett is Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has won the Pulitzer, Polk, and Peabody prizes for her journalism and is the author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. Here she answers questions relating to her current research on the danger of an avian flu pandemic.
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The Human-Animal Link
by William B. Karesh and Robert A. Cook

Recent outbreaks of avian flu, SARS, the Ebola virus, and mad cow disease wreaked havoc on global trade and transport. They also all originated in animals. Humanity today is acutely vulnerable to diseases that start off in other species, yet our health care remains dangerously blinkered. It is time for a new, global approach.
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The Lessons of HIV/AIDS
by Laurie Garrett

To get a sense of the broader damage a new pandemic might do, it helps to consider the one the world is currently enduring: HIV/AIDS. Because this deadly scourge moves slowly, many of its social, political, and economic effects have yet to be understood. But the impact is hard to overstate. And it is growing.
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