The world hash’t seen a pandemic(流行疾病)in 4 1 years,when the”Hong Kong”flu crossed the globe and killed about one million people worldwide.If H1N1 flu(甲型流感)reaches pandemic levels,what would happen next? The outbreak of SARS in 2003 rang alarm bells as potential pandemics.Although it jumped the”animal-to·human”barrier,neither disease changed enough to enable human-to.Human infection.Strictly speaking,SARS did not become pandemics because it was too good at killing their hosts.For a pandemic,it needs to be able to maintain human-to.human contact without killing its host off. ”H1N1 flu is already a man-to-man disease,which makes it much more difficult to manage. And H1N1 flu appears much more infectious than SARS. But the WHO warns,it cannot say whether or not it will indeed cause a pandemic.According to experts,here’s what the world might see if there is another pandemic,based on past experience. The disease would skip from city to city over an 18-to-24 month period,infecting more than a third of the population.World health Organization officials believe as many as 1.5 billion people around the globe would seek medical care and nearly 30 million would seek hospitalization.Based on the last pandemic and current world population,as many as 7 million people could die.Hospitals will become overcrowded;schools will close;businesses will close;airports will be empty.Business will become very bad,as people avoid as much social contact as possible. Health facilities will become overrun with patients and there would be less-than-adequate staffing,as medical health professionals fall ill themselves and that would result in higher deaths. The very young and very old will likely be the most susceptible(易受感染的)to the illness.Experts warn,much is still unknown about the current H1N1 flu virus and its severity and it is too early to say whether it will lead to a pandemic.Right now,the focus is on finding answers and controlling the spread. 小题1:How many kinds of disease is mentioned in the passage?
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