Ahead of Schedule, H1N1 Flu Season Arrives in the U.S.
by ilene - September 26th, 2009 3:07 pm
Ahead of Schedule, H1N1 Flu Season Arrives in the U.S.
By Michael Scherer, courtesy of TIME
On the edge of the Western plains, in Spokane, Wash., the reports of significant student sickness started coming in this week. By Thursday morning, nine of the area’s roughly 300 schools were reporting absentee rates in excess of 10%. H1N1 had arrived with the end of summer, just as expected.
"This would be comparable to what we would see in a moderate flu season in January or February," says Mark Springer, the Spokane Regional Health District’s epidemiologist. "This is just a snapshot in time. We would anticipate increases."
Across the country, the pattern is much the same. This year’s novel flu virus is hitting much sooner than normal, long before cold weather forces people inside, where viruses like to fester, and weeks before the official start of flu season on Oct. 4. The virus has been gobbling geographic terrain in recent weeks, with 26 states reporting widespread flu illness on Sept. 19, up from 21 states a week earlier and just four states at the beginning of August.
The good news is that hospitalizations remain an exception for those getting the flu, and deaths of children have been relatively rare — with two or three pediatric deaths being reported each week, below the threshold of a full-blown epidemic. Over the past year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has received reports of 117 influenza-related deaths of children, of which 25 occurred in children younger than age 2 and 35 occurred in children ages 5 to 11.
"Flu season is definitely here," says Dr. Anne Schuchat, a CDC assistant surgeon general who is helping to coordinate the response. "We don’t know when it is going to peak or how many waves there will be."
But Schuchat and other government officials are getting closer to putting a better solution in place. As Schuchat made clear on Sept. 24 in a briefing at the White House, the flu vaccine is set to arrive in the next few weeks, sparking a national vaccination campaign that will be run by state and local governments. Early tests on the vaccine have been promising: there are no red flags about safety, and studies suggest that many Americans will be able to build up sufficient flu resistance with just one dose, instead of the two or…
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CDC leery of estimates about swine flu’s toll
by ilene - August 27th, 2009 1:47 am
Swine Flu News
CDC leery of estimates about swine flu’s toll
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard
WASHINGTON – Government health officials are urging people not to panic over estimates of 90,000 people dying from swine flu this fall. "Everything we’ve seen in the U.S. and everything we’ve seen around the world suggests we won’t see that kind of number if the virus doesn’t change," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…
While the swine flu seems quite easy to catch, it so far hasn’t been more deadly than the flu strains seen every fall and winter — many people have only mild illness. And close genetic tracking of the new virus as it circled the globe over the last five months so far has shown no sign that it’s mutating to become more virulent.
Still, the CDC has been preparing for a worst-case flu season as a precaution — in July working from an estimate slightly more grim than one that made headlines this week — to make sure that if the virus suddenly worsened or vaccination plans fell through, health authorities would know how to react.
On Monday the White House released a report from a group of presidential advisers that included a scenario where anywhere from 30 percent to half of the population could catch what doctors call the "2009 H1N1" flu, and death possibilities ranged from 30,000 to 90,000. In a regular flu season, up to 20 percent of the population is infected and 36,000 die…
Continue Swine Flu article here.>>
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.