Is swine flu next global killer? Could be — or not, experts say

Despite the cool calm of public health officials doing their best to keep everyone else the same about the swine flu outbreak, in the background looms the fact that the bug is the mutant descendant of the virus that took out 50 million of the earth's human inhabitants 90 years ago.

That doesn't mean that's bound to happen here now, although history and the nature of such outbreaks would say we're due this year or next for another big one. No one can say that or much else about an outbreak for sure. Certainty flies in the face of preparing for a much more widespread infection. And, anyway, it's really not the nature of nature to allow for much certainty.

Of the few things officials from the Utah Department of Health and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could say for sure last week as they kept tabs on a possible swine flu epidemic/pandemic is that the 2009 version of the influenza type A virus N1H1 arrived the same way previous viral generations have — suddenly. And, even if this outbreak subsides just as suddenly, only the next six weeks or so will tell. Chances are that the capacity of the virus that has kept it going strong and mutating out of sight and out of mind of most human beings all this time could well mean a more virulent strain will be here this winter flu season, or the one after that.

"We just can't really say much of anything for certain," state epidemiologist Teresa Garrett said after a news conference Friday during which the health department updated the tally of probable Utah swine flu cases to nine. Pretty much everything else is an unknown or not going according to pattern. Not only is the outbreak hitting in the off-season for flu, it's new. Therefore there's no track record, and because it hasn't been out in the human population to a great degree, people haven't built up any natural immunity, Garrett said. Health departments all over the world are keeping close watch, she added, "but it will take the course it takes."

It could, like its predecessors, make a wrong turn and simply die out, or run its course like other types of flu. That public health officials can't be more definite, isn't anything special about swine flu. Uncertainty is the nature of all life on earth. Uncertainty is the nature of science research that tries to plot the likely course of a disease or where the next earthquake or what's really on Mars.

Although science has spent the more than 300 years since Newton had the famous incident with the apple trying to figure out all the working parts and how they interrelate, nature has become knowable but is far short of the pursuit's lofty goal of predicting what it will do.