From 2004: Talking about what a potential pandemic could look like
Jan. 27, 2004 discussion on CBC Radio's The Current explored the potential dangers of a possible flu pandemic
A lengthy on-air discussion with an epidemiologist is something you would expect to hear on the news these days, given the current worldwide battle with the coronavirus pandemic.
But in January 2004, CBC Radio's The Current was talking to one such expert about a different type of virus — an avian influenza known as H5N1 — that had the potential to cause widespread problems if it were to begin readily spreading through human populations. (The National would provide further coverage on this same issue a few weeks later, a brief portion of which is shown in the clip at the top of this page.)
"How worried should we be about the current outbreak of avian flu?" host Anna Maria Tremonti asked her guest, epidemiologist Dr. Danuta Skowronski, during the broadcast on Jan. 27, 2004.
Skowronski then spent the next 10 minutes talking to Tremonti about the intricacies of the H5N1 bird flu and its specific risks from a human-health perspective. And she made it clear this was "a potential concern" and not a definitive outcome.
The possibility of a pandemic, however probable, was obviously very concerning — especially given Canadians' familiarity with the deadly consequences of the then-recent SARS outbreak a year earlier.
'Either overdue or it's imminent'
From a current lens, perhaps the most interesting part of the 2004 conversation on The Current surrounded the discussion of what the world would look like if confronted by an influenza pandemic — including coping with a lack of antiviral drugs or vaccines and how hospitals would handle an influx of sick patients.
There was also talk about the likelihood that the world would at some point face another major influenza pandemic, seemingly sooner rather than later.
"We can track, historically, pandemics — for instance there were three in the last century alone, but generally occur every 10 to 40 years," the epidemiologist said, when speaking about past influenza-related pandemics.
"The last was in 1968 — so, if you do the math, you can see that we're either overdue or it's imminent."
Five years later, in 2009, the World Health Organization would declare a pandemic amid the spread of the H1N1 swine flu — and that was a decade before the COVID-19 crisis struck.
