Summary
The global influenza virus is a challenging wicked problem that has been wiping out millions of people for over a hundred years. The virus adapts and mutates the strains, making the flu problematical to eradicate with our current methods.
The Wicked Issue
The problem with Influenza started in 1918 when the Spanish flu broke out causing the first flu pandemic the world had ever faced. The BC Medical journal called the epidemic, “The greatest medical holocaust in history” (Skowronski and Kendall). Little did they know back in 1918 that the virus was only going to adapt and create different strains. It was the beginning of one wicked issue that future generations were going to have to combat and attempt to finally eradicate.
The virus is destructive due to the fact that it isn’t just one strain that we can just eradicate. The viral disease has an abundance of different strains that mutate which makes it challenging to stop. The different types of the virus are Influenza A, B, C, and their sub-types. The different strains are introduced to humans by animals. For example, the 2009 Swine flu pandemic also known as H1N1 was influenza C and multiple subtypes of Influenza A. Therefore, not only can humans contract the swine flu, but so can pigs. Swine flu eventually decreased in number of occurrences, then again it is still possible to catch.
Today,
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The 2018 flu season brutally struck the United States. Even though the strain that went around H3N2 wasn’t new the vaccination that was made did not protect the majority of the public against that certain strain. Wretchedly, the hasty virus was, “only successfully targeted by vaccines in about 30% of cases, according to the CDC” (Ducharme and