Well, Revere from Effect Measure has done it again. He has posted three very excellent articles that all of you should be reading about the swine flu epidemic. What’s that you say? What swine flu epidemic? I’ll tell you, the one that is still happening, despite the fact that you may or may not know someone who has had it.

The first article I’d like to put out there is called Transmitting Swine Flu By Talking To Someone. It’s his commentary and explanation of a very thorough (thanks to Chinese paranoia around the disease) look at the actual way that the disease is behaving in terms of contagion in human hosts. Essentially, a group of travellers included someone who was sick with swine flu. They were contained and their movements closely tracked by the Chinese government, and an epidemiologist has been able to publish his findings based on this small outbreak. That’s an amazingly lucky thing, because so often we don’t have enough data to truly know how the disease has been spread.

The second, Ferreting out How Swine flu Crowds Out Seasonal Flu, looks at a study done using ferrets to determine how the H1N1 flu interacts with other strains of influenza. There are some surprises here. It tells us that a host can be infected with multiple versions of influenza (the seasonal varieties), something we have only seen since 1977. However, even more intriguing is the fact that the ferrets who were infected with several types of influenza only passed on the H1N1 swine flu.

The last article I am hesitant to post a link to unless you PROMISE me you’ll read the whole thing. It’s called When Swine Flu Kills, and reviews an examination of 70 fatal cases of swine flu. There’s a lot of really good information here, but I must admit that as I read it I often found myself having trouble remembering that this is a study of only a small number of fatalities, and thus the morbidity of the data is definitely one-sided. As Revere says in the first paragraph, “Before we hit the panic button (and we should never hit the panic button, anyway), let’s consider the larger context.

I post these articles because I keep hearing people make light of this disease. We saw it come and go, and therefore we’re safe, right?

Wrong.

Epidemiology tells us that this is not how epidemics work. There is no reason at all to believe that we are safe on the other side of this thing. In fact, the dearth of data shows that we are likely, though by no means guaranteed, to see a lot more of this. It’s more like we’re not sure if this is the eye of the hurricane or a storm blowing over, and to continue that analogy, when the storm stops it’s best to stay safe and cautions for a while to make sure it’s finished blowing.

Jim