On the evening of April 21, I posted a Canadian Press report: Branswell on the California swine-flu cases. Excerpt:
U.S. public health authorities are investigating two cases of swine flu in unrelated children in California, a development that has officials in Canada and elsewhere on alert.
Discovery of the two cases, in children who apparently had no contact with pigs or with each other, suggests there probably has been some person-to-person spread of swine flu viruses, officials of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control said Tuesday.
Whether the viruses continue to spread isn't currently known.
I believe that was my first swine-flu post, and I considered the story a mildly interesting distraction, like a dengue outbreak in Jakarta. How little I knew.
Up until then, Flublogia occasionally considered the possibility of another influenza strain sneaking up behind us, but H1N1 was not a candidate. I understood it to have been the cause of the Spanish flu pandemic, now too mutated to be a threat. But China had had a "pig fever" scare back in 2005-2006, so this new outbreak deserved some attention.
Then the roof fell in, and years of Flublogian speculation vanished. We had thought the pandemic would come out of some smelly little southeast Asian village, transferred to some luckless airline passenger who would infect other passengers before they arrived at Los Angeles or Frankfurt.
Instead, North America was the source, and Asia the luckless target. South America, which I thought would be the last continent infected, has been battling the pandemic for months.
I started this blog in March 2005 as a form of self-education, and it has certainly educated me--mostly in my own ignorance. But the last four months have educated the whole planet in how profoundly ignorant we remain about influenza.
I wonder how much more we will learn by December 21, four months from now.
