UW News

January 25, 2007

Pandemic Pandemonium in the Pacific? Find out Feb. 7

The transit of people, products, and disease across the Pacific Ocean is the topic of Dr. Ann Marie Kimball’s lecture, Pandemic Pandemonium in the Pacific, at 6:30 p.m, Wednesday, Feb. 7. The lecture is part of UW Medicine’s medical lecture series at the Seattle Public Library’s Microsoft Auditorium, 1000 Fourth Ave. Doors open at 6 p.m.


As trade and travel draw the Pacific Asian countries closer to our western continent, we share a common challenge of pandemics of human disease. While “bird flu” is in the headlines today, many forget that HIV reached Asia from North America in the 1980s, causing untold deaths, and SARS threatened both continents in 2003. Kimball explores options to enhance pandemic preparedness and to assure the safety of all populations.


Kimball, professor of epidemiology and health services at the UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine, and director of the APEC Asia Pacific Emerging Infections Network, explains the increasing risk to our global village.


“A number of pandemics have crossed the Pacific,” Kimball said. “HIV/AIDS crossed the Pacific in the early 1980s, traveling from the United States to Australia and Thailand. For SARS, the disease traveled across the Pacific from Asia to the United States. Influenza crosses the ocean every year. The point I’m trying to make is that we are a more integrated community, increasingly connected through trade, travel, capital, and jobs. And we’re mixing up pathogens and disease patterns.”


In her new book, Risky Trade — Infectious Disease in the Era of Global Trade (Ashgate 2006), Kimball looks at transnational trade and the spread of pandemics through products. Using the 1990s outbreak of E-coli in Sakai, Japan, as an example, Kimball noted that 12,000 people were affected by an outbreak because of contaminated white radish seeds that were grown in Oregon.


“What we are doing is risky. We don’t really know what the risks are. We need to increase our ability to detect disease and to share information. We’ve made a start, but we have a lot of work to do. We have some tools — such as disease modeling, looking at social patterns that affect diffusion of a pathogen. But the task of bringing the new mobility of goods and people into our understanding of infectious disease is at a very early stage. We have to be a lot more serious about pursuing understanding of this new disease ecology and and we clearly need to ramp up public health protections.”


One of the methods of ameliorating risk of pandemics, Kimball said, is fixing the health care system in the United States.


“Probably the most serious situation we have in this country is that we have many people who don’t have access to health care, without health insurance. These are wage earners without benefits. And when they get sick, they continue to go to work until they are completely incapacitated, because they can’t afford not to. We need to focus on building that safety net and taking care of people. In case of a pandemic of flu for example, we ask people not to come to work or school. We cannot ask that of wage workers if we do not assure their financial ability to do so. We cannot trust our detection of disease in the community if millions of people cannot afford to access the health system in a timely way.


“It’s in America’s interest to raise our consciousness to raise very strong health care safety nets both domestically and internationally. It’s in the interest of wealthier countries to assist in financing health care safety net infrastructures in poorer countries. This is not only compassionate, it is smart. ”