Red=main idea
Blue=further information
Flu in the US
Flu, Mostly Mild, Has Spread Across U.S.
By: DENISE GRADY (New York Times)
Published: May 3, 2009
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/health/04flu.html
Swine flu(influenza A[H1N1]. The name, Swine flu, made people believe they could infect the virus by eating pork. However, there is still no proof that this strain of influenza came from a pig so the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) announced on 30th April 2009 to stop calling it Swine flu, but W.H.O. gave it a new name, influenza A (H1N1).) has become widespread in the United States, with 226 cases in 30 states(403 confirmed cases on 5th May 6, 2009. The top five states include New York at 90, Illinois, 82, California, 49, Texas, 41 and Delaware, 20.) and more expected to turn up in additional states in the next few days, federal health officials said Sunday.
“I think it’s circulating all over the U.S.,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, the interim deputy director for science and public health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a news conference. “The virus has arrived, I would say, in most of the country now.”
The good news, Dr. Schuchat said, is that most cases in the United States have been mild, and health officials in Mexico said that cases there seemed to be leveling off.
But Dr. Schuchat said, “I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet.”
She said the virus, called H1N1 by scientists, had a number of unusual features that were cause for concern. It has flared up at a time of year when the flu season is normally ending. It is new, so people probably have little or no resistance to it.
And unlike the common types of seasonal flu, it appears to infect an unusually high percentage of young people. The median age of patients is 17.
“Very few confirmed are over 50,” Dr. Schuchat said. “They tend to be younger. Whether it will pan out in the weeks ahead we don’t know, but it is a pattern that looks different from seasonal influenza.”
Of 30 people hospitalized in this country, she continued, a high proportion are older children and younger adults, a big change from the age groups that generally have the highest risk of needing hospital care for flu: the elderly and the very young. (A 23-month-old child in Texas was the first victim in the US.)
She said scientists at the C.D.C. were preparing a “seed stock” from virus samples that could be used for a vaccine. (The US federal officials said that it would take almost a year to make enough vaccine to protect all Americans from the flu and many years to satisfy global demand.)
Similar work began several weeks ago to make a vaccine to protect pigs from the H1N1 virus, said Dr. John R. Clifford, the chief veterinary officer for animal health for the Department of Agriculture. He said the new virus had never been found in pigs in this country. But pigs in Canada have contracted it from a human, indicating that the animals are susceptible.
Worldwide, laboratories have now confirmed 898 human cases of the new swine flu in 18 countries, according to the World Health Organization.
Outside the Americas, the country with the most cases is Spain, with 44. All but four involved people who had recently traveled to Mexico, and all are recovering, the Spanish Health Ministry said.
The ministry said it would tighten controls at airports on Monday, but did not say how. Passengers arriving from affected areas have been filling out health questionnaires, and cabin crews have been supplied with gloves and masks.
The possibility that H1N1 might be passed back and forth between humans and pigs was discussed at a World Health Organization news teleconference from Geneva on Sunday. Canadian officials reported on Saturday that an infected farm worker had spread the virus to pigs in Alberta.
Peter K. Ben Embarek, a food safety scientist with the health organization, said there was also a risk that the disease could go the other way: that people who worked closely with sick animals on farms or in slaughterhouses could catch it from the pigs. In the past, he said, people have caught other types of swine flu from contact with infected pigs.
“Of course that could happen again here,” Dr. Ben Embarek said, adding that it was important to avoid exposing people to sick animals — and also to avoid exposing pigs to sick people.
Dr. Ben Embarek and other health officials reiterated that it was safe to eat properly cooked pork and also cured pork products like ham.
“You can continue to eat safely your prosciutto,” he said.
The cases in the pigs in Canada were detected because of a policy introduced months ago in Alberta, which requires farmers and veterinarians to report all cases of flu in pigs to the government. But Jurgen Preugschas, the chairman of the Canadian Pork Council, said the country’s decision on April 24 to increase oversight of the pork industry, in response to the H1N1 outbreak, probably led health officials to react quickly to the report from the Alberta farm.
In the United States, farmers are not required to report flu in pigs to the government. Dr. Clifford said that influenza was endemic in pigs in this country. Every year, he added, some pigs sick with the flu are tested and the virus is analyzed, and the new strain of H1N1 has never been found in pigs in this country.
“Just like people have flu seasons, so do pigs, normally in fall and winter,” Dr. Clifford said, adding that vaccine is widely used, and that some 58 million doses were produced last year for pigs in the United States. If a new vaccine is produced to prevent H1N1, it will be up to individual hog producers to decide whether to use it.
In New York, researchers are still trying to figure out why so many students at St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens became infected; 59 cases, all of them mild, have been linked to the school.
Nancy Clark, assistant commissioner for environmental disease prevention at the New York City Health Department, said one suspect, a new ventilation system at the school, did not appear to be a cause.
“We inspected many components of it, and generally found it to be in good condition and clean,” Ms. Clark said.
Swine flu kills first US resident; White House tells cities to stop closing schools
By: HELEN KENNEDY (THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)
Published: May 5th 2009
Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/05/05/2009-05-05_swine_flu_kills_first_us_resident_texas_officials_confirm.html
A Texas woman who lived on the Mexican border and was already weakened by chronic illness became the first U.S. resident to die of swine flu.
The news came as federal health officials reversed course and began advising cities to quit closing flu-infected schools, saying the bug is far less of a threat than first feared.
Officials did not release many details about the dead woman except to say she was in her 30s, lived in Cameron County in south Texas and had existing health problems.( She was a teacher in the Mercedes Independent School District, which announced it would close its schools until May 11.)
Last week, a boy from Mexico City who died in a Houston hospital became the first flu death in the United States.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 403 cases in 38 states Tuesday, with an additional 700 or so probable cases.
Health officials said they expect the swine flu outbreak to keep spreading and to cause more deaths but said it isn't lethal enough to offset the hassle of shuttering schools.
"We no longer feel that school closure is warranted," said CDC head Richard Besser. "We are not seeing the rates of severe disease that had been reported initially out of Mexico."
He said the new flu is turning out to be similar to the regular winter flu that kills 36,000 Americans a year and normally doesn't shutter schools.
"If you're seeing a very high-mortality event, the potential benefits of school closures outweighs the risk," Besser said. "When you get to situations that are approaching that of seasonal flu, then the downsides start to outweigh the benefits."
Last week, fearing a repeat of the multiple deaths reported in Mexico, the government advised schools to shut down for 14 days if a student came down with swine flu.
Local officials across the country began to panic at every sneeze, and more than 725 schools closed nationally, disrupting the lives of nearly half a million students, not to mention their parents.
Besser was told of children being dropped off at public libraries and parents losing their jobs because they had to stay home with their kids.
He said schools that suffer a really widespread cluster, such as the hundreds of sick students at St. Francis Prep in Queens, should probably close just because going on with school with so many absences would be difficult. (about 1,000 people have been sickened and 45 diagnosed with the virus at the school. The school just reopened on Monday after a week closure. But still, 204 of the school's 2,700 students called in sick.)
3 flu shots for Americans?
By: The Washington Post
Published: May 6, 2009
Source: http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_12303374
The Obama administration is considering an unprecedented fall vaccination campaign that could entail giving Americans three flu shots — one to combat annual seasonal influenza and two targeted at the new swine-flu virus spreading across the globe.
The multibillion-dollar effort would represent the first time that top federal health officials have asked Americans to get more than one flu vaccine in a year, raising serious challenges concerning production, distribution and the ability to track potentially severe side effects.
Experts are evaluating a raft of complicated issues, including who ought to receive an inoculation against the H1N1 flu and whether private vaccine makers can simultaneously manufacture the standard 180 million doses as well as up to 600 million rounds of the new vaccine.
"We are moving forward with making a vaccine," said Robin Robinson, a director with the Department of Health and Human Services who oversees pandemic-response programs.
Meanwhile, Mexico emerged from its swine-flu isolation Tuesday as thousands of newspaper vendors, salesmen hawking trinkets and even panhandlers dropped their protective masks and joined the familiar din of traffic horns and blaring music on the streets of the capital.
There were still signs, however, of the virus that set off world health alarms. A Texas woman who lived near a popular border crossing was confirmed as the second outside Mexico and the first U.S. resident to die after contracting the virus. Mexico's Health Department later announced three more confirmed deaths, raising the country's total to 29.
The Texas woman, the second confirmed person to die with swine flu in the U.S., lived not far from the Mexico border and had chronic medical conditions, as did the Mexico City toddler who died of swine flu last week during a visit to Houston, health officials said.
The 33-year-old woman was pregnant and delivered a healthy baby while hospitalized, said Leonel Lopez, Cameron County epidemiologist. She was a teacher in the Mercedes Independent School District, which announced it would close its schools until Monday.
With 942 people sickened in Mexico at last count, public celebrations of Cinco de Mayo were banned.
Denver's annual festival, which typically draws 400,000, will be held as planned this weekend, with hand-sanitation stations installed at the urging of city health officials. In Chicago, the Mexican Civic Society of Illinois canceled its annual festivities because of flu concerns.
The H1N1 flu has sickened more than 1,700 people in 21 countries, including more than 600 in the United States. The World Health Organization said it was shipping 2.4 million treatments of anti-flu drugs to 72 countries "most in need," and France sent 100,000 doses of anti-flu drugs worth $1.7 million to Mexico.
Mexican Finance Secretary Agustin Carstens unveiled plans Tuesday to stimulate key industries and fight foreign bans on Mexican pork products. He said persuading tourists to come back will be a top priority.
Carstens said the outbreak cost Mexico's economy at least $2.2 billion, and he announced a $1.3 billion stimulus package, mostly for tourism and small businesses, the sectors hardest hit by the epidemic.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said he will ask governments to reverse trade and travel restrictions lacking a clear scientific basis.
My Reactions
1) The confirmed case in the US is increasing almost every day.
2) Many schools in the US have been closed because of infection and fear.
3) The first victim in the US is a 23-month-old child in Texas and the first US resident victim is a teacher in South Texas.
4) The US government is considering about flu vaccine campaign that Americans should get 3 shots a year instead of a shot per year.
5) It is reported that H1N1 has never been found in pigs in the US.
Conclusion
There are many cases reported in the US, two people died and hundreds infected. The infection rate tends to increase, especially near the US and Mexico border. Not only the flu that is spreading all over the US, but also fear and anxiety, hundreds schools have been closed and workers called in sick.
Even though there are many reports about how severe the flu is, but if we really take time researching we will see that it is actually almost the same as seasonal flu. It’s just new that’s why people are so concern about it. We still have no vaccine against it, but when we do, we will just treat it like any other diseases. There are still many diseases more terrify than this.
I don’t think that it’s time to scare, but it’s time to protect ourselves from it. The media should also educate people of how to act during the overspread, not just report or publish bad news of how many have died or infected. The flu is not only threatened our life, but also extremely affected our economic and tourism worldwide.
