Is Containment of a Disease Possible Anymore?

When H1N1 (swine flu) first emerged, there were lots of calls for the border with Mexico to be shut. Thankfully, the idea was recognized as preposterous and rejected.

Now, Australia is dealing with its first H1N1 fatality – an aboriginal man living in a far off province. And they don’t know how he contracted it:

The 26-year-old man became Australia’s first person to die after testing positive for the virus. He had been living in Kiwirrkurra, one of the country’s most remote Outback communities.

Australia officials are worried that Aborigines are at higher risk from swine flu because they already suffer high disease rates.

A team of health workers has travelled to Kiwirrkurra, located some 600km (375 miles) west of Alice Springs in the arid Gibson Desert. They are keen to determine how the swine flu virus reached such a far-off location. In the past week the number of confirmed cases doubled in the Northern Territory, where Aborigines make up almost one-third of the population.

I’m reminded of the movie Outbreak. A strain of Motaba – something like Ebola – is in a small coastal California, and the government quarantines the town (and prepares to bomb it). The President is shown a chart of what would happen if the virus escapes the town – something like the entire country dying within days, really, then the world.

In a real life situation, it’s never that cut and dry though. Diseases like swine flu are rarely so neatly contained that it’s possible to stop them. Even in the movie, the host of the disease is a monkey running rampant through California forests.

That said, if there was an Ebola outbreak, we would definitely see quarantine – just because any effort in slowing it down would be useful. (Think 28 Days Later) But swine flu and disaeses like that are not of that quality, and by the time it’s clear that they’re different from regular flu, it’s too late (and too expensive in a globalized marke) to quarantine. And thus suddenly aboriginals in Australia suddenly catch it.