specific patterns of personal hygiene like hand washing can diminish the person-to-person transmission of flu and social media platforms can be quick and easy way to get the word out.
3. Know When to Not Go. Voluntary restriction from the school or the workplace when sick is an imperative means to diminish infectious spread. If the flu becomes a real threat, parents must be prepared to welcome school closures to protect their children and their teachers. It is a matter of education and should be a requirement for school administrators, health professionals, chief executive officers, and religious leaders who determine when the faithful congregate.
4. Strengthen Our Health Agencies. It is necessary to make timely investments in local, state, national and international organizations that are tasked to respond to any substantial infectious event. To that end, the World Health Organization and our National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control can serve. A dedicated nucleus of recognized international experts should be formed as a ready response team in preparation for the next outbreak. They will surely be put to work, as there will always be another.
5. Don’t Neglect Research. Zoonotic diseases are ever occurring. Some are relatively harmless; yet, others may intermittently and unpredictably spread with such ferocity that unprepared and inadequate health systems will surely be overwhelmed. A prompt coordinated redirection of a significant proportion of our limited resources for climate remediation should instead be directed towards infectious disease research. This is the vital lesson of the terrible scourges of the past and our precarious response to the recent Ebola epidemic.
This flu season is a good time for all of us to rethink our place in the global village and embrace reciprocal stewardship through common need.
Dr. Bill Miller had been a physician in academic and private practice for over thirty years. He is the author of The Microcosm Within: Evolution and Extinction in the Hologenome. Dr. Miller is an internationally recognized evolutionary biologist and an expert on the emerging science of the microbiome. He is the author/co-author of numerous academic papers on the microbiome and evolution, serves as guest editor of a major academic biology journal and is co-editor of a forthcoming textbook on developmental and evolutionary biology.