by John
The current approach to managing a global influenza pandemic for all 6,781,243,583 people on the earth (as of September 1, 2009; http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html) involves small groups of health officials, influenza scientists, and company executives mostly from industrialized nations (paraphrased from David Fedson’s paper published in March 2009 in the journal “Emerging Infectious Diseases” which can be found at the following CDC url http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/15/3/pdfs/365.pdf ). In this paper Fedson makes a compelling plea for a more global perspective on dealing with the much over-hyped influenza pandemics that circle the earth such as the H1N1 swine flu. Fedson points out that there will be only enough doses of any influenza vaccine to vaccinate 700 million of the 6+ billion population and that this number of vaccinations is less than the combined population of the nine countries that produce flu vaccines.
I discovered quite by accident that there may be other ways to receive protection from the flu that have not been talked about during the annual media blitzes which balance sensational fears with bureaucrats covering their derrieres. This was another paper by Fedson published in a July 2006 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases (vol 43 pages 199-205) entitled “Pandemic influenza: a potential role for statins in treatment and prophylaxis.” The title surprised me because statins like Lipitor and the generic Lovastatin are well known cholesterol lowering drugs … and they work well. In fact Pfizer’s Lipitor is the top selling drug worldwide with over $11 billion in sales projected for 2009. There may be more adults taking cholesterol-lowering statins than any other kind of drug. The fact that generic forms of statins also work well suggests that the 6+ billion could have access to these cholesterol-lowering drugs at low cost.
So how does this relate to influenza? Read the rest of this entry »
