Pandemic could collapse health system

By Angela Mulholland, CTV.ca News

Four Dutch experts, led by Dr Albert Osterhaus from the Erasmus medical centre in Rotterdam, expect the worst. Their report in scientific journal Nature warns that the next influenza pandemic could hospitalize almost 30 million people, causing an economic disaster.

Health economist Martin Meltzer with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control is also concerned about how many people will become seriously sick from a pandemic and how overburdened our health-care systems will become.

He notes that during the Spanish Flu of 1918, only about 1.5 to two per cent of those infected died. The rest were made gravely ill and were unable to work. If that experience were to repeat, countless numbers of people would descend upon our country’s hospital system. And if the experience of SARS in Toronto is any indication, our health system would have difficulty coping.

Dr. Louis Francescutti, director of the Alberta Centre for Injury Control and Research recently told a panel of emergency workers from the United States, Mexico and Britain that Canada’s health-care system would probably collapse during a flu pandemic.

"SARS wasn't even a dress rehearsal" for this sort of outbreak, Francescutti said. "You're going to have just about everybody trying to get into the health-care system, which will slowly collapse.”

Of course, not all flu pandemics have to become global in scale. Indeed, the outbreaks in 1957 and 1968 were confined mostly to the continents of Asia. But much has changed in the last 40 years, mostly due to the explosion of air travel.

The World Health Organization could try to slow the spread of an outbreak by restricting worldwide travel and commerce to and from affected areas, but it’s unclear how effective those restrictions would be in the early days of an outbreak. And Canada knows all too well the devastating effects of one sick traveler crossing our borders.

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