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

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

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: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.