We beat swine flu

A year ago today, Lyn Finelli, chief of flu surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gathered her team and advised them to prepare for the worst.

A flu epidemic was brewing, Finelli said, caused by a virus never before seen in humans. In Mexico, hospital workers were sick and dying. "That scared all of us," she says now, because "we all know from SARS and Ebola what a red flag it is" when health workers who guard against infection fall ill themselves. "It means the virus is very contagious and very virulent."

. . . This is the story of those early efforts. A year has passed since epidemic experts began tracking the birth of the 2009 H1N1 swine influenza pandemic. Now that swine flu has peaked and faded, postmortems are underway. The CDC and World Health Organization are dissecting their responses to a virus that in a matter of days leap-frogged via jumbo jet from Mexico to the rest of North America, Europe and beyond.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-04-22-swineflu22_CV_N.htm

Prevention worked . . . because we acting quickly and intelligently and ignored the "vaccines are dangerous" crowd.