The next flu pandemic will wing its way through the world at break-neck speed, hitching a ride on unsuspecting air travellers, speeding through train tunnels, and racing through shorter distances on bicycles, according to the author of a new book.

"Every year, one billion people travel by plane and in so doing provide viral hitchhikers unprecedented opportunities," Calgary-based journalist Andrew Nikiforuk told CTV.ca.

"In the 19th century, steam ships took a couple of months to spread trouble; now it can de done in less than 12 hours. The concentration of people in megacities also guarantees rapid dispersion," said Nikiforuk.

He argues in his new book "Pandemonium" that our health is being threatened by biological invaders moving at unprecedented speed.

Unlike past pandemics, the next one will break all speed records, he writes.

"Long before we suspect its presence, the invader will be travelling thousands of kilometres or miles a day by planes, buses, or trains," Nikiforuk writes.

"It will then spread out over shorter distances by cars, bicycles, subways, inline skates, and skateboards. Soccer moms may innocently drive the pandemic across every major North American city."

This has significant ramifications for Canada, which saw SARS cross its borders by way of international air travel in 2003.

Should the next pandemic originate in Asia and make its way to Canada, it is likely to leave its first calling card in Vancouver, Nikiforuk believes.

"The next pandemic, if it originates in Asia, will likely invade a West Coast port first, thanks to the volume of trade and traffic Vancouver or Seattle have with other Pacific Rim countries," said Nikiforuk, who won the 2002 Governor General's award for non-fiction for his book "Saboteurs."

The impact of a severe pandemic will be ominous, he warns, describing scenes that seem to be straight out of horror movies.

"Within a week of the invasion, people will have trouble buying food and medical supplies. The cemeteries will overfill and local meatpackers will store the dead in refrigerated trucks. Rumours that cats and dogs may spread the invader will prompt urban animal massacres," Nikiforuk writes in his book.

"Entire police precincts, fearful of hauling away the dead and weary of nailing red influenza signs on doors at the homes of the infected, will report sick and not answer calls."

Canadians would be prudent to heed warnings before it's much too late, said Nikiforuk, who added that disaster plans rarely work according to plan.

"If one-third of the population is sick, essential services will be compromised. If the virus jumps species and is spread by cats, expect pretty vigorous catocides. It's all happened before in Asia and Europe. During the first wave of avian flu governments blamed wild birds for the mayhem and encouraged the mass culling of wild birds in parks, for example. In a state of panic, people obliged,' he said.

Nikiforuk predicts a severe flu pandemic will also curtail travel, encourage the sale of record numbers of life insurance policies, and lower the price of oil.

While Nikiforuk says it is necessary to stock up on food and paper face masks, it will become most important to revive relationships.

"Get to know your neighbors. End any disputes or conflict in your family: in the end survival always boils down to family and the health of the family," he said.

He believes Vancouver and Halifax will do better in their response to a severe pandemic than the cities of Calgary and Toronto simply because of their sense of community, which he calls "the world's best disease fighter."

"In Calgary you have so many newcomers and your health infrastructure is completely overloaded that if you add a pandemic to that scenario, the whole system collapses," he said.

"I guess you could argue on one hand that a pandemic might actually be a good thing for Calgary, it could restore a sense of community."

Cities that nourish their communities and pay heed to the importance of civic capital will be miles ahead of those with stockpiles of the antiviral drug Tamiflu, he believes.

In fact, he scoffs at assertions from health-care professionals that Canada is ahead of the game because it has a contract with a vaccine supplier.

"What the disaster professionals aren't saying is that we might have a vaccine but it might well be entirely ineffective," he said.

"'We'll have difficulty getting it to you, there will be long lineups, and we can't guarantee the purity of vaccine so there will likely be horrendous reactions to it as well.'"

While Canada stands a chance of scraping through a mild outbreak, a severe pandemic with a 2.5 per cent mortality rate could spell disaster.

Indeed, that mortality rate could rise to 5 per cent with the number patients who are already ill.

Nikiforuk dismissed charges of fear-mongering from critics who urge against sky-is-falling warnings.

"Tell that to somebody who lost a relative to the C. difficile epidemic, tell that to somebody who lived through SARS, tell that to somebody who lives in the interior of B.C. and has just lost their forest economy, tell that to someone who lives on Great Lakes where fisheries have been hammered by biological invaders, tell that to people working the livestock industry, or to people who recently bought spinach from U.S. and got E. coli," he said.

Indeed, the threat of a flu pandemic is only one example of a global menace unleashed by the forces of globalization, Nikiforuk argues.

"For us, the rate and scale of biological invasions is the biological equivalent of improvised explosive devices going off in our livestock, in our food supply, in our water, in our hospitals," he said.

He wrote this book, Nikiforuk explains, to wake people up to the reality of the time.

"My book was written for ordinary people who really don't understand the scale and pace of biological invasions shaking up our food and health systems. Louis Pasteur believed that "Chance favours the prepared mind."

An excerpt from "Pandemonium"

Epilogue: The Next Pandemic

"No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all."

-Albert Camus

Six years ago the U.S. government staged a mock biological attack in Denver. The simulated exercise, which involved top officials of the state and federal government, cost $3 million. Like two subsequent exercises, it was designed to test the efficacy of emergency and medical plans. The mock attack began on May 17 with the simulated release of an aerosol spray containing bubonic plague. On Day 1, 783 citizens fell ill; on Day 2, hospitals ran out of drugs, and infected travelers popped up in England and Japan; by Day 3, city hospitals were forced to turn away the plague-ridden; by Day 4, there were more than 3,700 cases of infection and 2,000 deaths. "Disease had already spread to other states and countries," recorded one public health expert and observer, Thomas Inglesby. "Competition between cities for the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile had already broken out. It had all the characteristics of an epidemic out of control."

If the next invader is a kin of the bird flu or H5N1, it will go global in weeks and soon be out of control. As it explodes around the world, the invader will find three conditions unique to our era: a just-in-time global economy, unprecedented urban crowding, and unparalleled human mobility that our ancestors might have regarded as miraculous or even divine. These unwitting preparations will shape the next pandemic and drive it into unknown territory.

Ancient societies understood the importance of surge capacity and often devised seven-year plans to withstand famine, drought, and plague. Technological society has mocked such forethought. The essayist Ian Welsh thinks our new economic habits of living like hedonistic grasshoppers as opposed to Aesop's prudent ants will disastrously magnify the pandemic's impact. "Our society, as a whole, has no surge protection, no ability to take shocks. We have no excess beds, no excess equipment, no excess ability to produce vaccines or medicines, nothing. Everybody has worshiped at the altar of efficiency for so long that they don't understand that if you don't have extra capacity you have no ability to deal with unexpected events." The pandemic, then, will test the sustainability of the just-in-time supply chains pioneered by Wal-Mart and other multinationals.

Urban crowding will also shape the course of the invasion. Two hundred years ago, most humans lived in rural areas, and only one city in the world boasted a population of 1 million people: London. But global trade and migration in the last 100 years has changed that picture by concentrating more than half of the world's people in cities. Today 35 metropolises-human feedlots-claim more than 5 million residents each, and hundreds harbor more than 1 million souls each. Tokyo proudly supports 35 million people, Mexico City claims 19 million "official" residents, and London boasts 7 million inhabitants. The most crowded slums of Mumbai, Delhi, or Nairobi nurture population densities exceeding 80,000 residents per square kilometer (200,000 residents per square mile).

This kind of concentration is dry tinder to viral sparks, and it guarantees the "superdiffusion" of any viral invader. "We are all, so to speak, sitting in the waiting room of an enormous clinic, elbow to elbow with the sick of the world," writes the historian Alfred Crosby, Jr. A 2004 report by the CIA's National Intelligence Council predicts that a "pandemic in the megacities of the developing world with poor health-care systems" could spread with devastating effect and "derail globalization."

Historically pandemics have never been kind to urban dwellers. According to the Greek historian Thucydides, the world's first recorded pandemic (known as the plague of Athens) killed almost a third of the population with what was likely typhoid. It arrived with merchants from Ethiopia. The Antonine plague (the plague of Galen), a visitation of measles or smallpox carried by returning imperial troops, emptied the city of Rome in ad 165 and dispatched two emperors. The plague of Justinian, an invasion of bubonic plague spread by African grain ships, silenced 40 percent of the population of Constantinople in ad 541. In the 14th century, the Black Death often killed off half the residents of urban slums. The 1918-19 influenza pandemic buried more than 50 million people. Most were either urban dwellers or soldiers packed into camps that resembled slums.

Unlike these past pandemics, which rarely traveled faster than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) a day, the next one will break all speed records. Long before we suspect its presence, the invader will be traveling thousands of kilometers or miles a day by planes, buses, or trains. It will then spread out over shorter distances by cars, bicycles, subways, inline skates, and skateboards. Soccer moms may innocently drive the pandemic across every major North American city.

The dying will begin with a careless sneeze that will propel as many as 100,000 viral particles from one end of an airplane cabin to the other at 128 kilometers (80 miles) an hour. The virus will enter the throat and upper lungs of a mobile trader or a tanned tourist and then hijack the cells to make more viral invaders. Two to seven days later, the infected will feel fluish. If each person infects just two others, then one infection will become 1,024 infections within 30 days, which means the pandemic won't become a serious conflagration. But if it finds superspreaders and hits a reproductive rate of greater than three, the invader will change history. The first North American cases will probably appear in either Vancouver or Los Angeles, key centres in the trade with Asia.

Initial symptoms may mimic the ordinary aches and pains of the flu or offer something altogether different. During the 1918-19 pandemic, influenza triggered a storm in the immune system of young adults by flooding their lungs with anti-inflammatory chemicals and suffocating their airways. This exuberant immune response (a "cytokine storm") had many disturbing manifestations. Some people watched their fingers and genitals turn black, while others smelled their bodies decaying before death declared itself. Some went to bed with a pounding headache and never woke up. Others survived but remained brain damaged for life.

Medical experts generally agree that if the pandemic is mild, the flu will infect between 25 and 30 percent of the world's population and kill 2 million to 7 million people. Such an event will not be a demographic disaster or an economic catastrophe. But a nasty invader along the lines of the 1918-19 strain would leave a bitter wake. Any influenza strain that targets 20- to 40-year-olds and tricks the immune system into searing the lungs could yield global death tolls as high as 300 million. The death rate among pregnant women, the most vulnerable, could approach a horrific rate of 70 percent. Such a rare and unique event would change the world.

From: Pandemonium by Andrew Nikiforuk. Copyright © Andrew Nikiforuk. Reprinted with permission of Penguin Group (Canada).