WHO Raises Swine Flu Threat Level

Solarch writes "Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, the WHO raised the pandemic threat level for H1N1 "swine flu" to 5. Global media outlets(such as CNN, Fox News, and the BBC) preempted normal broadcast coverage and immediately published stories on their websites. To clarify, the WHO's elevation is mainly a sign to governments that the virus is spreading quickly and that steps should be taken on a governmental level to stage supplies and medicines to combat a possible pandemic. Unfortunately, broadcast coverage focused on phrases like 'pandemic imminent' (CNN marquee). In other news, patient zero, the medical term for the initial human vector of a disease, has been tentatively identified in Mexico."

Comments

Semi-Pandemic

[Plekto]

The sad thing is that it will affect the poor and the Third World most of all. Only the extremely ill, old, young, and those with compromised immune systems will have a problem in more developed countries where antiviral medicine is available.

$50 for some medicine is pretty much nothing in the U.S., for instance. If you're in India or China, well... life's going to get rough for a lot of people there.

Re:Semi-Pandemic

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the virus strikes people with healthy immune systems, and the causes of death are an immune system overreaction. Translated: People with excellent immune systems are more likely to die than those with weaker ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm

Re:Semi-Pandemic

[Vellmont]

It it is most dangerous to those with strong immune systems because of the potential for cytokine storms

Which is pure speculation at this point. The truth is nobody knows why it's mostly killed young people so far. Pointing to a cytokine storm as the cause is possible, but very misleading.

Re:Semi-Pandemic

[Brett Buck]

The sad thing is that it will affect the poor and the Third World most of all. Only the extremely ill, old, young, and those with compromised immune systems will have a problem in more developed countries where antiviral medicine is available.

Not necessarily. The reason the 1918 version of H1N1 was so bad was that those with healthy immune systems were more likely to die because the immune system overreacted. You have a point about the antiviral medicine, but the other factors *favor* those in third-world countries.

Brett

Re:Semi-Pandemic

[theNAM666]

The sad thing is that it will affect the poor and the Third World most of all. Only the extremely ill, old, young, and those with compromised immune systems will have a problem in more developed countries where antiviral medicine is available.

This is likely somewhat inaccurate. The efficacy of SARS and the previous avian flus-- and of pandemic flus in general-- is that they cause the strongest human immune systems (18-30 yrs) to overreact and fill the lungs with fluid, slowly drowning the victims. (Antivirals are also not all that effective, versus respirators and manual techniques to clear the lungs).

We also don't quite know what we're up against, get.

That said, if the developing world looses its young and strong, that is in some ways worse. But don't think the developed world is out of the way: avian flu killed one in three victims in Hong Kong, right?

Re:Semi-Pandemic

[an unsound mind]

Aaand clarifying before justified downmods:

It kills healthy people, more of them thus far than ill people. And it's rather obvious why it hasn't killed much people in the last 30 years - if you don't get that, get the hell outta my Slashdot and your ass into Biology 101.

It's not yet confirmed it's cytokine storm precisely - but it's certainly a possibility on the table.

Re:Semi-Pandemic

[aetherworld]

Actually, the virus strikes people with healthy immune systems, and the causes of death are an immune system overreaction. Translated: People with excellent immune systems are more likely to die than those with weaker ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm

ACTUALLY, you should read the article you're citing:

Recent reports of high mortality among healthy young adults in the 2009 swine flu outbreak has led to speculation that cytokine storms could be responsible for these deaths.[6] However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) has indicated that symptoms reported from this strain so far are similar to those of normal seasonal flu,[7] with the CDC stating that there is "insufficient information to date about clinical complications of this variant of swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus infection."[7]

not easy to know how to respond

[phantomfive]

I read an article a couple days ago, apparently there was a swine flu outbreak in 1976, and the US was quite proactive in stopping it, encouraging everyone to get vaccinated. The problem came when more people died from the vaccine than from the flu. So the correct path of action is not always clear, how far should you go to try to prevent this? Wall Street Journal has an interesting article dealing with these issues.

As for me, being young and healthy, looks like I'm about to roll one of my d20. Whatever happens happens, I'll enjoy it to the end.

Re:not easy to know how to respond

[Kryis]

Sadly, when you take into account incubation time, it can be very difficult to contain something like the 'flu. The virus is out in the world, not just mexico. Anyone an infected person comes in to contact with between them contracting the virus and being diagnosed could potentially pick up the virus themselves.

Even if you totally closed off Mexico right now, there are sill infected people that have already left the country, and are in contact with the general population of whatever country they are in right now. The WHO have already said that this is past the point that it can be contained. We just have to hope that this doesn't turn out to be the super-deadly virus the media claim it is.

Um, no.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

One of the remarkable facts about this outbreak is that the deaths in Mexico are primarily among healthy adults between 20 and 50--similar to the profile of the Spanish flu of 1918. However, one of the yet unresolved puzzles about the virus is why the mortality figures in Mexico are proportionally so much larger than in the USA, so yeah, we just don't know what's going on yet...

Re:I'll repeat what I heard elsewhere

[Delwin]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/world/americas/25mexico.html?_r=1

Most of the deaths have been young adults

[billstewart]

Most of the deaths reported in the press have been non-elderly adults, as opposed to the regular flu where 90% of the deaths are already-sick old people and the rest are mostly kids who are too young for flu shots. Until the latest news articles (which said that "150 deaths" was "maybe actually only 7-8 confirmed to be swine flu"), the number of deaths from swine flu was about 1% of the total number of regular-seasonal-flu deaths during the past week.

Re:No evidence for "Cytokine Storm"

[theNAM666]

People, stop spreading this stupid, unfounded meme. The folks who have been verified to have died from H1N1 2009 have been from a country with a poor health care system and a city that is horrible in terms of air pollution and other environmental conditions.

Please STOP spreading this racist, unfounded meme. While Mexico is a developing nation with a "poor" health care system, hospitals in Mexico City and elsewhere are modern, with up-to-date equipment and well-trained personnel. While pollution is a problem, not necessarily more so than in parts of New York City or LA, especially in the downtown zones under the new environmental rules. Significant advances in air quality have been made in the past 10 years, under AMLO and Ebrard.

There is no clear, obvious reason for a higher morality rate across Mexico, including and especially in the downtown Mexico City hospitals, than in the US.

CDC says bacterial secondary infection was killer

[billstewart]

If you look at that CDC search, one article that jumps out is this one, which says that based on later research, it looks like the big killer wasn't actually the influenza itself or related cytokine storms, but secondary bacterial infections causing pneumonia among people weakened by the influenza. That's actually fairly good news, because it's much more likely that we can treat those in a hurry with existing antibiotics (as opposed to waiting 6 months to get a newly-tuned H1N1 vaccine or using the increasingly-ineffective antivirals like Tamiflu), and because quarantine also reduces the spread of bacterial infections so people who do get the flu are less likely to get the secondaries.

Re:No evidence for "Cytokine Storm"

[musicalmicah]

Please STOP spreading this racist, unfounded meme. While Mexico is a developing nation with a "poor" health care system, hospitals in Mexico City and elsewhere are modern, with up-to-date equipment and well-trained personnel. While pollution is a problem, not necessarily more so than in parts of New York City or LA, especially in the downtown zones under the new environmental rules. Significant advances in air quality have been made in the past 10 years, under AMLO and Ebrard.

There is no clear, obvious reason for a higher morality rate across Mexico, including and especially in the downtown Mexico City hospitals, than in the US.

Really? I'd think that having minimal running water for days at a time could be a problem. Also, how about a population density that's over seven times that of New York City?

Re:Please let it be!!

[FatdogHaiku]

I think it's partially human nature though.

They call it Schadenfreude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude and there is a lot more of it in the world than one would like to believe.

Re:No evidence for "Cytokine Storm"

[Knara]

It's not racist. Mexico City's infrastructure is not great on average, and it's MUCH more polluted than NYC or LA. This isn't a knock against Mexicans, it's a fact of life.

Re:Please let it be!!

[treeves]

I thought so too, but I just found this:

Swine flu name wont be changed in Israel
By Marc Brodsky April 29, 2009
NEW YORK (JTA) -- The swine flu will not take any new names in Israel despite the unease of a health official from a fervently religious party.
Deputy health minister Yakov Litzman, a member of United Torah Judaism, said earlier this week that the name "swine flu" should not be used as it contains the name of the unkosher animal. Litzman suggested that authorities call the virus sweeping the globe "Mexican flu."
But Mexico's ambassador to Israel, Frederico Salas, and the Jewish state's envoy to Mexico, Yosef Livne, both lodged official complaints Tuesday to the Israeli Foreign Ministry protesting the term.
A Foreign Ministry official told the French news agency AFP that Salas "was offended" by the term "Mexican flu."
"Israel has no intention of giving the flu any new names," the official said. "It was nothing more than a slip of the tongue."
Two Israelis who recently returned from Mexico have contracted swine flu in the first such cases in the Middle East. Several other cases are suspected, including the 5-year-old niece of one of the confirmed cases.

Re:Please let it be!!

[Bitmap0023]

whats strange is the original outbreak of the 1918 spanish flu started at a Kansas army base. As the WW1 soldiers were deployed to Europe the virus went with them.

Re:No evidence for "Cytokine Storm"

[Acapulco]

Uhmm....I don't want to sound like a troll but...are you even a Mexican living in Mexico City?

I am and I really don't think air quality has improved in any measurable rate, let alone "significant advances".

Also, while I agree with you on stopping racist memes, Mexico really does have a VERY poor health care system. Those modern, well-equipped hospitals with well-trained personnel are mostly private ones, and the few of them who are actually public ones are not enough to take care of millions of patients. Sure, you might have a surgery with the best equipment in a public hospital, but that's going to happen after a VERY restrictive screening process. There's just not enough money to build a health care system efficient enough to combat a possible pandemic like the one we might be facing.

Hell, our public health care system is in bankruptcy, quickly driving towards the cliff in part because we have more administrative personnel than actual doctors and nurses....go figure... (I can't find the link right now, but it's a well-known statistic down here)

Re:Please let it be!!

[Znork]

It wasn't a natural disaster, wasn't an accident, wasn't even a war. It was a big...

The term you're looking for is blowback.

Re:Doesn't scare me at all

[bemymonkey]

"Cooking pork to an internal temperature of 160ÃF kills the swine flu virus as it does other bacteria and viruses."

So undercooking it (=under 160 deg F), like the blueskies said, _can_ lead to infection...

Re:Please let it be!!

[smoker2]

whats strange is the original outbreak of the 1918 spanish flu may have started at a Kansas army base.

Fixed that for you.

Some scholars have theorized that the flu probably originated in the Far East.[25] While historian Alfred Crosby observed that the flu seems to have originated in Kansas, the political scientist Andrew Price-Smith has published data from the Austrian archives suggesting that the influenza had earlier origins, beginning in Austria during the Spring of 1917.[26] Popular writer John Barry echoed Crosby in proposing that Haskell County, Kansas was the location of the first outbreak of flu.[27] In the United States the disease was first observed at Fort Riley, Kansas, United States, on March 4, 1918,[28] and Queens, New York, on March 11, 1918. In August 1918, a more virulent strain appeared simultaneously in Brest, France, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and in the U.S. at Boston, Massachusetts. The Allies of World War I came to call it the Spanish flu, primarily because the pandemic received greater press attention after it moved from France to Spain in November 1918. Spain was not involved in the war and had not imposed wartime censorship.[29]