H1N1 Flu Perspective
by ilene - November 23rd, 2009 12:45 pm
H1N1 Flu Perspective
By Ilene at Phil’s Stock World
Below are excerpts from a number of articles regarding the H1N1 flu pandemic in the Ukraine and the Norway mutation. The "Norway" mutation was found in three cases in Norway, and throughout other countries as well. Due to its ability to bind to receptors deeper in the respiratory tract, it is speculated that it may confer greater virulence to the H1N1 virus. It has not been proven to be spreading wildly throughout the Ukraine and other regions – it may be endemic however, as part of the mixture of circulating flu. More research needs to be done to learn the extensiveness, communicability of, and significance of this form of the H1N1 virus.
First, for perspective, here’s a entry in Wikipedia about deaths in the 1918 flu pandemic:
The global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 pandemic is not known, but it is estimated that 10% to 20% of those who were infected died. With about a third of the world population infected, this case-fatality ratio means that 3% to 6% of the entire global population died. Influenza may have killed as many as 25 million in its first 25 weeks. Older estimates say it killed 40–50 million people while current estimates say 50—100 million people worldwide were killed. This pandemic has been described as "the greatest medical holocaust in history" and may have killed more people than the Black Death.
As many as 17 million died in India, about 5% of India’s population at the time. In Japan, 23 million people were affected, and 390,000 died. In the U.S., about 28% of the population suffered, and 500,000 to 675,000 died. In Britain as many as 250,000 died; in France more than 400,000.[18] In Canada approximately 50,000 died. Entire villages perished in Alaska and southern Africa.[which?] Tafari Makonnen (the future Haile Selassie) was one of the first Ethiopians who contracted influenza but survived, although many of his subjects did not; estimates for the fatalities in the capital city, Addis Ababa, range from 5,000 to 10,000, with some experts opining that the number was even higher, while in British Somaliland one official there estimated that 7% of the native population died from influenza. In Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), around 1.5 million assumed died from 30 million inhabitants. In Australia an estimated 12,000 people died and in the Fiji Islands, 14% of the population died during only two weeks,