Cuba plans to fight swine flu with authoritarian measures

Cuba is ready to use just about everything at its disposal, from its well-oiled civil defense system to the soldiers of a totalitarian government, to keep swine flu cases to a minimum.

As the U.S. prepares an extensive health survey for side affects from its extensive inoculation plans, Cuba’s No. 2 health official says relying on a shot to contain a world pandemic is risky as best — and demoralizing at worst.

Cuba’s sophisticated public-monitoring system and geographic isolation as an island have kept swine flu cases to just 435 in a country of 11 million — and no deaths to date. That’s roughly 1 in 25,000 people compared with 1 in 6,900 in the U.S. and 1 in 4,000 in Mexico.

Swine flu plans for the new season involve all ministries, including the armed forces. If necessary, the government will isolate neighborhoods or entire villages, shut down highways and dispatch medical teams to communities affected by swine flu, Estruch said.

Soldiers can go door to door to enforce mandatory quarantines and evacuations — and authorities think nothing of severing areas from all contact with the outside world.

"In a matter of hours, we can determine what resources to send," Estruch said. "We’ve thought it out. . . . We’ve considered what to do if we have to paralyze a town, if we have to stop public transit, if we have to close the schools."

It works, but only at the cost of individual freedoms, said Jose Azel of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies.

Cuba "certainly has advantages to do what it wants to do that we can’t — commanding people," he said.

“If there is a serious influenza epidemic, and I doubt that H1N1 qualifies, . . .”

The early indications are that H1N1 has peaked in Colorado this yean. Fewer cases this week than last. Of course, last week it seemed that every kid in the state had “the Swine.”

My Dr. tells me the cases of seasonal flu he is starting to see this year are much worse than the Swine.

Influenza is very sneaky, very prone to mutation and adaptation, and it uses the species it infects much like a giant computer.

That is, as an example, a swine herd was found in Vietnam where each pig had an average of five mutations of the same influenza in competition to develop the best strain. Then the best strains of each pig would compete in semi-finals against each other until the single most effective strain infected the entire herd.

Extrapolated to flocks and herds of the numerous species it infects, the end result is a continual worldwide flux of the various types and strains of the virus. Like a wildfire, it is to some extent responsive to the weather, but otherwise unpredictable in its behavior.

This means that we are reliant on predicting its macro-behavior much like we do the weather—when it has behaved in a way before, it raises the odds of it doing so again.

As far as immune system resistance goes, it can be compared to a human extended family. If you are immune to a member of a nuclear family, you likely have some protection to the parents, siblings and children. Less protection to the cousins, less protection still to the second cousins.

This is why the same *type* of flu needs vaccinations every year, because it is likely far enough away from the previous years’ type that it looks like a different organism.

The H5N1 Avian flu influenza is a very different case, however, because as a species, we have zero familiarity with it. This means it fits into the much more lethal rules of an entirely new pathogen.

Instead of influenza, its rules are more like that of the myxomatosis epidemic that almost wiped out rabbits in Australia in 1950, killing 98% of them in just two years.

While not projected to be as lethal as that disease, it could likely be far more deadly than either of the major black plagues that ravaged Europe in the 14th and 17th Centuries.

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