Mediaboss Marketing

If the pigs, people, and birds have died in China from H7N9, it is imperative and urgent that the biological connection be made.

By LAURIE GARRETT

WASHINGTON Heres how it would happen. Children playing along an urban river bank would spot hundreds of grotesque, bloated pig carcasses bobbing downstream. Hundreds of miles away, angry citizens would protest the rising stench from piles of dead ducks and swans, their rotting bodies collecting by the thousands along river banks. And three unrelated individuals would stagger into three different hospitals, gasping for air. Two would quickly die of severe pneumonia and the third would lay in critical condition in an intensive care unit for many days. Government officials would announce that a previously unknown virus had sickened three people, at least, and killed two of them. And while the world was left to wonder how the pigs, ducks, swans, and people might be connected, the World Health Organization would release deliberately terse statements, offering little insight.

It reads like a movie plot I should know, as I was a consultant for Steven Soderberghs Contagion. But the facts delineated are all true, and have transpired over the last six weeks in China.

The events could, indeed, be unrelated, and the new virus, a form of influenza denoted as H7N9, may have already run its course, infecting just three people and killing two.

Or this could be how pandemics begin.

On March 10, residents of Chinas powerhouse metropolis, Shanghai, noticed some dead pigs floating among garbage flotsam in the citys Huangpu River.

The vile carcasses appeared in Shanghais most important tributary of the mighty Yangtze, a 71-mile river that is edged by the Bund, the citys main tourist area, and serves as the primary source of drinking water and ferry travel for the 23 million residents of the metropolis and its millions of visitors.

The vision of a few dead pigs on the surface of the Huangpu was every bit as jarring for local Chinese as porcine carcasses would be for French strolling the Seine, Londoners along the Thames, or New Yorkers looking from the Brooklyn Bridge down on the East River.

And the nightmarish sight soon worsened, with more than 900 animal bodies found by sunset on that Sunday evening.

View post:
Is this the next pandemic? Tale of mystery virus unfolds like a movie plot (Commentary)