Swine flu now a "full-scale pandemic"

Additionally, even if it doesn't mutate it can still be dangerous. My understanding is that the 1918 flu wasn't particularly aggressive, it's just that even a 1% mortality rate will kill a lot of people if everyone on the planet gets it. (Rhetorical effect before you pick me up on that).

Meanwhile, in my own country if you tested positive for swine flu they would trace everyone you'd been in contact with and give them Tamiflu. There are now so many cases in Glasgow and surrounding areas that they now have stopped doing this, conceding that attempts at containment have failed. So far as far as I'm aware there have been no deaths but while it is a mild strain there have been a number of hospitalisations with people seriously ill, so it seems to be nip-and-tuck for some individuals.
 
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GreNME said:
And despite the reporting (and some ChickenLittles), having more to do with insufficient medical treatment or other conditions and not the inherent lethality of the disease itself.
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Of course this is true. I think the first death in the USA was a Mexican child who was brought to the US for treatment because they don't have it in Mexico.
 
I'm not sure I understand all the hand wringing over this. Approximately 36,000 people die from the flu every year just in the US. No one seems overly concerned about that.

Oh, that thing about older folks not getting the flu, old news. Some believe they have an immunity from being exposed to it pre 1957.

This has led to speculation that older individuals have at least some degree of pre-existing immunity to swine flu, possibly from years of immunization with seasonal flu vaccines, which contain different H1N1 viruses than the current outbreak strain, or previous infection
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The H1N1 virus responsible for the 1918 flu pandemic continued to circulate in the population until 1957, when an H2N2 virus displaced it, he said.

"Thus, the first experience with influenza for most individuals born between 1918 and 1957 would have been with H1N1," he said. Those people are now between 52 and 91 years old.

If that previous exposure provided residual protection against the new swine flu virus, as observations seem to support, "there may well be some degree of protection sufficient, at least, to prevent serious illness in a significant proportion" of the population, he said.
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http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFluNews/story?id=7647943&page=1
 
The Painter said:
I'm not sure I understand all the hand wringing over this. Approximately 36,000 people die from the flu every year just in the US. No one seems overly concerned about that.
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Well, we are all concerned about that which is why there's usually a vaccination programme for susceptible individuals. Inevitably some will die despite that.

As I understand it*, we appear to have a rather rapidly spreading virus that in the best case scenario will be mild and kill a few people just like the ordinary flu. On the face of it that's not so bad, but that's the best case. It's easy to imagine other cases where we have a rapidly spreading virus that has mutated into something that is more aggressive, or which combines with the normal round of winter illnesses and starts killing more people. It's been suggested that the 1918 flu didn't kill many people per se, but weakened them to the point where other things could carry them off (bacterial pneumonia has been proposed). Bear in mind as well that in the Northern hemisphere we're in the throes of summer, and this flu will still be with us in the flu-friendly winter months - Australia's seen a four-fold jump of cases in a week.

That's why goverments are keeping a close eye on what's happening. It may turn out to be nothing, but there's a chance it could become a big problem and they want to be prepared. Of course the media always goes nuts with these things and make it sound like Aporkalypse Now.


*Understanding may be flawed ;)
 
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The Painter said:
Of course this is true. I think the first death in the USA was a Mexican child who was brought to the US for treatment because they don't have it in Mexico.
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For some reason I detect sarcasm in your words, yet what you're pointing out isn't actually refuting what I said.
 
Oliver said:
>1%?

However, Pandemic doesn't imply that the Pandemie is a deadly one or not. It just says that it's getting out of control.
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About 1/2%- OF THE MOST SEVERE CASES.

Remember, it's likely that there are ten mild cases that never get diagnosed for every 'confirmed' case. A couple weeks ago the CDC estimated 100,000 cases in the US.

I guess I'll rank the Piggy Pandemic right up there with the Sniffles Pandemic. The Sniffles Pandemic is just as wide spread, and nearly as dangerous.
 
paximperium said:
Read up the definition of pandemic used by the WHO. It does not rely on lethality but on spread.

They should have raised this to level 6 over a month ago but did not want to cause panic.
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From what I heard on the radio yesterday, but cba to check online, the WHO set up the pandemic monitoring system to deal with things like SARS and bird flu, which if they did spread would be very serious. The system is overkill (if you'll pardon the phrase) for something like H1N1 which seems, so far, to be relatively mild when recognised and treated appropriately (which seems to be what did not happen initially in Mexico).
 
casebro said:
About 1/2%- OF THE MOST SEVERE CASES.

Remember, it's likely that there are ten mild cases that never get diagnosed for every 'confirmed' case. A couple weeks ago the CDC estimated 100,000 cases in the US.

I guess I'll rank the Piggy Pandemic right up there with the Sniffles Pandemic. The Sniffles Pandemic is just as wide spread, and nearly as dangerous.
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It indeed is as deadly. But in contrast to "Sniffles", they don't have a vaccine against the new swine flu. So the message of the WHO [to me] seems to be: "Tell your local citizens to be careful". After all, the next Pandemic might be a serious threat to a major population of Humans and this time, we got away with a "blue eye" in most cases.
 
Jaxe said:
What makes it different is the rate it has spread, the danger doesn't lie in its current lethality, what is worrying is if it mutates into something that IS more lethal.

Imagine a flue that is highly lethal and spreads across the world in 22 weeks.
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Is it spreading at an exceptionally high rate?
 
zooterkin said:
Is it spreading at an exceptionally high rate?
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Just in a high rate like every other flew - which indeed is far too fast if you're dealing with a deadly flew you don't have a vaccine for.
 
Oliver said:
Just in a high rate like every other flew - which indeed is far too fast if you're dealing with a deadly flew you don't have a vaccine for.
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Well, Jaxe was saying that this flu was different because it was spreading faster than normal flu, which is what I was querying.
 
I still don't get the concern. Countless strains of the flu are very virulent. It's why we have "flu season" every year. It's an extraordinarily common virus in its many different strains. I'm not convinced swine flu spreads any more rapidly.

I've seen nothing in death rates to indicate that the swine flu is any more dangerous than lesser known flus.

I'm not particularly concerned about the lack of a vaccine. We are likely all exposed to numerous flu strains every year that weren't in the vaccine available in our area, if we even bothered to get the flu vaccine.

Comparisons to 1918 leave out how much more advanced available medical treatment is today, at least outside of the third world. We may not be able to "cure" the flu, but we can make it far less likely to kill you.
 
Oliver said:
>1%?
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Again, going by WHO numbers, it kills about 0.5% right now. Using only WHO numbers, its been dropping from about 9% during the first few days (obviously wildly inaccurate) to about 0.5% now. It seemed far more dramatic in the early days, and it was below 1% already on the fifteenth of May.
 
patrick767 said:
I still don't get the concern. Countless strains of the flu are very virulent. It's why we have "flu season" every year. It's an extraordinarily common virus in its many different strains. I'm not convinced swine flu spreads any more rapidly.
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Well, the WHO disagrees.

As you point out, there are lots of different strains out there. But this particular strain is spreading much faster and more widely than any of the other strains in recent history.

Which is what makes it a pandemic. Normally, a new strain wouldn't infect nearly as many people in this short of a time.
 
patrick767 said:
Comparisons to 1918 leave out how much more advanced available medical treatment is today, at least outside of the third world. We may not be able to "cure" the flu, but we can make it far less likely to kill you.
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Our advanced medicine will probably let us manage this pandemic better but it is not a guarantee that we can make it less deadly unless we develop a vaccine. Also back then it may have been easier to quarantine people and they weren't living in a world where someone could cross continents in a matter of hours (and in doing so possibly infect a hundred or more others which will accelerate the spread). If it becomes more contagious and deadly then medical systems throughout the world may be overloaded. These are worst case scenarios and I'm not particularly worried about it myself but I see the potential strength of this virus and understand some of the possibilities.
 
PogoPedant said:
who.org says 144 dead and 28,774 infected in 74 countries as of yesterday. The deaths are almost exclusively located on the American continent, with the vast majority in Mexico.
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And just to add another data point, folks, the typical influenza that we deal with regularly kills about 36,000 people on average every year in the U.S. alone. I'm not saying we should simply ignore H1N1, but we need to keep it in perspective.

However, if all this attention to H1N1 gets more people to take their personal hygiene more seriously (washing hands, coughing into their sleeve, etc), then I think overall the attention is a good thing.
 
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