The way to reduce the risk of pandemics is to reduce population.
We also should greatly reduce international travel, since it is not necessary.
All pandemics occur when you increase the gene pool of the threat.
Reduce the population and travel, and the threat gene pool is reduced.
Like, say, 1918, when the world population was only around 1.5 billion, before air travel and global vacationing? Pandemics never happened then. Unless of course we count the Spanish Flu that
infected 1/3 of the global population and killed more than 50 million people worldwide, including 3/4 of a million in the U.S. Recall the stories of bodies being
stacked 3-4 deep in the streets.
A cordon sanitaire can be effective when a rampant strain of virus like Ebola is quickly detected. For flu viruses, with long incubation periods and symptoms similar to the common cold, it's largely impossible to quarantine (and the last H1N1 pandemic in 2009 was also transmittable via mosquito).
We (in the west) live in a different day and age, where vaccines are quickly developed, wiping these pandemics out for the most part within a short period of time, and where the health of people in the west (sans the very old and infirm) is several orders of magnitude better than it was when previous killer pandemics ravaged the world, as is the medicine to treat those that have become ill.
