is there anyone else that believes this flu to be overnblown?

[Joe Bob]

It's on the net....gotta be true....

[jyl]

Everyone knows Bush wasn't a "real" conservative.

[nynor]

well, there are reports that the CIA sprayed metro areas with biological pathogens, more or less to see what happens.... just saying.

[jyl]

Still wondering why the fatality rate is higher in Mexico. Read today that in Mexico "43.7% of samples from suspected cases so far tested had come back positive, a total of 397. Sixteen in this group had died." 16/397 = 4% which is very high for flu.

But of 400-some confirmed cases outside of Mexico, no deaths. (Aside from the Mexican 2 y/o in TX).

Is the difference because (or partly because) every country is now on alert and new flu cases are being aggressively treated?

[jyl]

Oh and good to know we are striking back at the swine.

"Pigs on a Canadian farm have been infected with the new swine flu virus — apparently by a farm worker back from Mexico — and are under quarantine, officials say. It is the first known case of pigs having the virus."

[DARISC]

As I understand it, the spread of this virus defines a pandemic and it is being dealt with by the world's medical community as any pandemic situation would be, regardless of the number of deaths, i.e., SOP.

That the media chooses to sensationalize it is...surprising?

The authorities I've read and heard strike me as dealing with the situation in the usual, objective and scientific way, saying nothing that is particularily alarming or terrifying; the media seems to be doing that, competing with itself for the most dramatic coverage as usual.

[mattdavis11]

Originally Posted by jyl

Still wondering why the fatality rate is higher in Mexico. Read today that in Mexico "43.7% of samples from suspected cases so far tested had come back positive, a total of 397. Sixteen in this group had died." 16/397 = 4% which is very high for flu.

Is the difference because (or partly because) every country is now on alert and new flu cases are being aggressively treated?

My guess is that it has nothing to do with the level of cleanliness in Mexico. They have and abundance of clean drinking water, there are no stagnant puddles because the waste water drainage is so awesome, and there aren't 9 families living on top of each other like they do here. Plus, their health care system is the best in the world, so the citizens were probably in top notch shape when they became sick. I'm sure it's nothing along those lines.

[Jims5543]

I would like to thank the news media for making everyone sit home and hide from the flu.

I took the kids to Sea World today and it was relatively empty. They even opened up Mata their new roller coaster early, today was its first day and I was one of the first to ride it. You lay on your stomach in it, it was insane. There was no line. Heck, no lines anywhere.

Anyway, we had a ball, the only thing we did different today was to clean our hands a little more than normal. Years ago my older son contracted Roto-Virus while at Disney ever since then we have always been diligent about disinfecting our hands periodically during the day. We just stepped that up a little without being ridicules.

Yes, the media is blowing this way out of proportion and I refuse to watch TV news at all. They are hurting a lot of businesses with their sensationalizing this.

[Hugh R]

No expert here, but it seems to me that if it is indeed "mild" it will be more widespread. If people are only mildly sick, they will not stay at home and increase the chances of infecting others. The marginal death rate could go up because more people are infected. Assuming the survival:death rate is constant, which it should be for a given virus. One of the reasons that Ebola doesn't spread well is because it kills isolated villages quickly and then burns out because it can't find more available hosts.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Media sensationalizes everything. They DIRECTLY have exacerbated:

- the swine flu
- the recession
- the housing bubble
- Obama
- the war in Iraq

(etc. etc. etc.)

I'm so utterly and completely disgusted with these peddlers of hype I don't bother. My television sits idle 24 hours a day (almost every day, except when there's a good baseball game on) and I don't visit online news sites except occasionally the BBC or NPR.

Ethics went out the window in the "profession" of journalism a long time ago. They're right up there with used car salesmen, politicians and realtors.

[stomachmonkey]

They closed my kids elementary school for this coming week.

Supposed to heading to Lyon next week for a business trip.

Am dreading getting off the plane on the other end.

Don't know what to expect in terms of their "testing" passengers.

My flight originates from TX and I assume will be given extra scrutiny.

[techweenie]

Originally Posted by Hugh R

No expert here, but it seems to me that if it is indeed "mild" it will be more widespread. If people are only mildly sick, they will not stay at home and increase the chances of infecting others. The marginal death rate could go up because more people are infected. Assuming the survival:death rate is constant, which it should be for a given virus. One of the reasons that Ebola doesn't spread well is because it kills isolated villages quickly and then burns out because it can't find more available hosts.

True, although ebola takes advantage of burial rituals in primitive populations, where washing the blood from a corpse is common.

If you study viruses, they evolve in a manner that simulates intelligence -- they mutate with a focus on surviving and thriving. The best virus "design" is one that is apparently mild for a period of time, while infectious. The ultimate virus design would be one that does not kill -- like parasites that travel interspecies. Some of those enter the brain and alter animal behavior in order to facilitate transport/infection.

[Tidybuoy]

is there anyone else that believes this flu to be overnblown?

My Answer: YES! And that's exactly why I'm selling surgical masks on eBay.

[jyl]

But poor sanitation, poor medical care, and generally poorer health would be true for Mexicans who contract the seasonal flu too. Yet the seasonal flu does not have anywhere near the death rate that swine flu appears to have, in Mexico.

So, if in Mexico swine flu has a death rate significantly higher than seasonal flu, why doesn't it have a higher death rate in the US?

There is much we still don't know about this flu. It is not time to relax.

Quote de jyl

Still wondering why the fatality rate is higher in Mexico. Read today that in Mexico "43.7% of samples from suspected cases so far tested had come back positive, a total of 397. Sixteen in this group had died." 16/397 = 4% which is very high for flu.



Is the difference because (or partly because) every country is now on alert and new flu cases are being aggressively treated?

My guess is that it has nothing to do with the level of cleanliness in Mexico. They have and abundance of clean drinking water, there are no stagnant puddles because the waste water drainage is so awesome, and there aren't 9 families living on top of each other like they do here. Plus, their health care system is the best in the world, so the citizens were probably in top notch shape when they became sick. I'm sure it's nothing along those lines.

[jyl]

Economist article:

The pandemic threat
Apr 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition

It’s deadly serious; so even if the current threat fades, the world needs to be better armed

IT IS said that no battle-plan survives contact with the enemy. This was certainly true of the plan drawn up over the past few years to combat an influenza pandemic. The generals of global health assumed that the enemy would be avian flu, probably passed from hens to humans, and that it would strike first in southern China or South-East Asia. In fact, the flu started in an unknown pig, and the attack came in Mexico, not Asia.

The hens, though, deserve some credit. The world has not had a pandemic (a global epidemic) of influenza since 1968. Four decades are long enough to forget that something is dangerous, and people might have done so had they not spent the past ten years considering the possibility that a form of bird flu which emerged in Hong Kong in 1997 might be one mutation away from going worldwide.

The new epidemic (see article) was raised on April 29th to just one notch below the level of a certified pandemic by the World Health Organisation. In an effort to halt the spread of the disease, Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, has announced that non-essential services should close down between May 1st and 5th, and people should stay at home. Part of the reason for worry is that, unlike ordinary flu, which mostly carries off the old, the victims of this disease are mostly young and otherwise healthy.

Still, this epidemic has not actually killed many people yet. That there have been a mere handful of confirmed deaths is probably the result of a lack of proper tests. But even if all the possibles are counted in, a couple of hundred fatalities cannot compare with the 30,000 deaths caused in America each year by seasonal influenza. So how scared should we be?

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

As far as this epidemic is concerned, it’s too early to tell. One unknown is how widespread the virus is in Mexico. If it is ubiquitous, and had not been noticed earlier because it emerged during the normal flu season, then this epidemic may turn out to be insignificant, at least to start with. No flu death is welcome, but in this case the new disease might not increase the immediate burden greatly. But if the new strain is relatively rare, or what is being seen now is a more dangerous mutation of what had once been a mild virus, then the proportion of infected people dying may already be high. The death-toll, then, will rise sharply as the disease spreads.

Either way, the authorities were right to hit red alert. Influenza pandemics seem to strike every few decades and to kill by the million—at least 1m in 1968; perhaps 100m in the “Spanish” flu of 1918-19. And even those that start mild can turn dangerous. That is because new viral diseases generally happen when a virus mutates in a way that allows it to jump species, and then continues to evolve to exploit its new host. If that evolution makes the virus more virulent, so much the worse for the host. HIV, the AIDS-causing virus, lived happily and benignly in chimpanzees before it became a scourge of people. In Mexico, the early indications are that two pig viruses that can infect people but rarely pass from person to person recombined with each other to create a virus which does so easily.

Changes in virulence have certainly happened before in influenza epidemics, which have struck in successive waves of different severity. The message is that it makes sense to put money and effort into containing the new infection even if it does turn out to be relatively harmless today. The more people who have the virus, the more virus particles there are for that one, fatal mutation to appear in.

Resistance is another reason to try to contain an epidemic early. New antiviral drugs that were not around during past epidemics seem to be effective against the current outbreak. But natural selection is a powerful force, and if the spread of the disease means they have to be used widely, a resistant strain of the virus could easily evolve.

Don’t wait till winter

Now is the time to prepare for the worst. Flu—including pandemic flu—tends to be seasonal. The infection will probably tail off in the north over the next few months and head south as winter gets a grip on the Earth’s less populated hemisphere. It would make sense, therefore, to put the antiviral factories on overtime immediately, and try to develop, manufacture and distribute a vaccine.

Crash vaccine programmes pose their own risks. In 1976 flu vaccines killed a lot of people in America. But the growth of biotechnology means there are new ways of making vaccines and new types of vaccine to make. Mostly, these have been aimed at the threat of bird flu. But laboratories will already be clearing the decks to receive their first samples of the new swine flu, and getting to work on countermeasures.

And there is one further lesson. The system of checking for new diseases also needs to be improved. Partly because everyone was looking at Asia, no one was concentrating on Mexico. But as genetic sequencing becomes cheap and routine, it ought to be possible to pick dangerous mutations up quickly.

That would mean sending samples from doctors’ surgeries to a central laboratory dedicated to sequencing, even when nothing strange was suspected. And that would require organisation and money. Not every person with a sniffle need be tested—only a small, representative sample. But if this had happened in Mexico over the past few months, the generals of global health would have seen that something was coming down from the hills and they could have mobilised sooner.

Active caution, then, is what is called for. The world’s policymakers, most of whom live in the northern hemisphere, should not be fooled into thinking the new virus is going away for long, even if it declines over the next few months. Instead, as in any phoney war, they should use the time they have been granted to reinforce the world’s defences by stocking up with antiviral medicine and making vaccines. They should also remember that, even if this flu turns out to be less frightening than feared, it is only a matter of time before a deadlier one comes along. A drill today will help to spare millions of lives in the future.

[RWebb]

Originally Posted by jyl

Still wondering why the fatality rate is higher in Mexico. Read today that in Mexico "43.7% of samples from suspected cases so far tested had come back positive, a total of 397. Sixteen in this group had died." 16/397 = 4% which is very high for flu.

But of 400-some confirmed cases outside of Mexico, no deaths. (Aside from the Mexican 2 y/o in TX).

Is the difference because (or partly because) every country is now on alert and new flu cases are being aggressively treated?

could be

or could be lower quality medical care or less access to same early enuff

or a pop'n that is less healthy to begin with

or that the virus is evolving towards lower virulence (think about it: why kill your host? that ruins your environment and you have to "jump ship" - better to get along with the host and even help the host - hence the (likely) evolution of mitochondria)

[RWebb]

Originally Posted by techweenie

True, although ebola takes advantage of burial rituals in primitive populations, where washing the blood from a corpse is common.

If you study viruses, they evolve in a manner that simulates intelligence -- they mutate with a focus on surviving and thriving. The best virus "design" is one that is apparently mild for a period of time, while infectious. The ultimate virus design would be one that does not kill -- like parasites that travel interspecies. Some of those enter the brain and alter animal behavior in order to facilitate transport/infection.

Mutations are random with respect to fitness (survival and reproduction).

What you say may appear to be true, if we do not see selection operating early on - and we rarely see selection operating at all. I know of only a single study demonstrating differential selection, but there are probably many in bacteria.


Viruses and other pathogens that alter behavior of the host already exist. e.g. slowing the running speed of an ungulate causes it to be singled out by wolf packs - the wolves are then infected.

[RWebb]

Originally Posted by Hugh R

No expert here, but it seems to me that if it is indeed "mild" it will be more widespread. If people are only mildly sick, they will not stay at home and increase the chances of infecting others. The marginal death rate could go up because more people are infected. Assuming the survival:death rate is constant, which it should be for a given virus. One of the reasons that Ebola doesn't spread well is because it kills isolated villages quickly and then burns out because it can't find more available hosts.

True. The main reason tho it that does not aerosolize. BUT, a variant that was in the lab at AMRAD (IIRC) DID aerosolize (able to spread thru the air).

If that one had recombined with a highly virulent strain, the potential death rate in the US would likely hit the tens of millions.

Enjoy your lunch!

[jyl]

On 5/2 NYC's health director was quoted as saying the city is not longer testing patients for swine flu except if their flu condition is severe or they are part of a suspected cluster of cases. He said he thinks there are 1,000 swine flu cases in NYC.

"Official" confirmed US cases per CDC is about 220. The official data will be undercounting the actual cases by a greater degree, if NY curtails testing.

[URY914]

Tampa just closed a high school and two middle schools for a week because of the scare. Also the kids from the high school that qualified for the state track and field meet can't go now. That sucks for them.