When Swine Flu hits South Africa and Zimbabwe - then what?

SHOOT: You may have forgotten but there was a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe. Currently 100 000 have been infected. How do you think those people will respond if they get swine flu? Then there's South Africa. There are approximately 5.7 million people living with HIV in South Africa, and almost 1,000 AIDS deaths occurring every day. That's a tinderbrush for an exotic disease to burn through.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Seasonal flu shots appear to offer no protection against swine flu. Scientists from the National Institute for Infectious Diseases in Tokyo looked at 43 laboratory-confirmed cases from Kobe and reported this week that those who had been vaccinated did not seem to get swine flu less often than other patients. The observations confirmed what American scientists had found in blood tests in the lab. Still, measuring severity can be tricky because the same flu virus may theoretically kill far more people in a poor country with widespread malnutrition and AIDS than it does in a wealthy, well-fed nation. No cases have been reported anywhere in Africa. Historically, there has been little flu surveillance on the continent, which has many more serious diseases to track, though South Africa has a laboratory that regularly reports cases to the W.H.O.