Swine Flu: The Pandemic That Wasn't

The swine flu pandemic didn't turn out to be the scourge international health agencies predicted. On Jan. 29 the World Health Organization declared that even though the H1N1 virus is still spreading in parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia, the number of confirmed cases worldwide is declining. About 14,000 deaths from swine flu have been reported. That's a tragic loss, but it's a small number considering that the run-of-the-mill seasonal flu kills up to 500,000 people each year, according to the WHO.

So what have health authorities, scientists, and vaccine makers learned from the global catastrophe that wasn't? That viral outbreaks of this sort are even less predictable than scientists thought and that the defenses in place today would have been utterly inadequate against a more virulent strain. "The overwhelming expression of [H1N1] was mild," says Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the WHO in Geneva. "Now a process has been established to help us learn."