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

I'll repeat what I heard elsewhere

[Sycraft-fu]

"Citation needed."

Seriously, I see Internet doomsdayers saying this, but I don't see the CDC saying this. So, can you provide a link to a reputable source for this? I'm genuinely interested in reading one. If not, then perhaps you should stop spreading it.

Re:I'll repeat what I heard elsewhere

[Knara]

Mod parent up. "Cytokine storm" is the new Internet meme lately.

With the grand WHO total of deaths being caused by H1N12009 being EIGHT, and the most well documented death so far being a 23 year old, the whole idea that this is killing otherwise healthy (a BIG assumption, this is Mexico, not the US, the health care system and environmental conditions in Mexico City is not very good in the former and absolutely terrible in the latter case) adults is isn't founded at all.

Re:Please let it be!!

[V50]

Yeah, there's certainly a section of the media that wants terrible news to happen. I don't think they consciously or overtly want stuff to happen, but deep inside, I do think that part of them does.

I think it's partially human nature though. I've found myself sort of bugged at times by part of me that wants a war to break out, or a pandemic to happen, or the stock market to tank, etc. I think it comes from oftentimes looking at news as fiction that happens far away. And for the most part it's true. If a war breaks out in Africa, for instance, for the majority of North Americans or whatnot, it may as well be fiction for how little it actually affects them.

tldr; When it doesn't directly harm them, IMO, people often look at news as fiction, and want a more exciting outcome.

And some just don't understand.

[Nethead]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egypt-orders-slaughter-of-all-pigs-over-swine-flu-1676090.html

Egypt began slaughtering the roughly 300,000 pigs in the country Wednesday as a precautionary measure against the spread of swine flu... Agriculture Minister Amin Abaza told reporters that farmers would be allowed to sell the pork meat so there would be no need for compensation.

Yeah, what's the price of pork in a vastly flooded market. Other stories on the subject report riots by the pig farmers and also note that the WHO says that you can't catch it from eating pork. This is more a case of the non-pork eating religious majority using this as an excuse to crap on the pork eating religious minority (and 'unclean' pig farmers.)

From a Hot Zone

[mathx314]

Allow me to explain my bias before embarking on this rant: I currently attend University of Delaware. At present there are 10 unconfirmed cases among the student body. Not a big number (total student number is ~13,000), but diseases do have a tendency to spread quickly among student populations.

What bothers me about this isn't that people are overreacting, which they are to a large extent. I don't feel the need to wander around with a surgical mask and I'm right in the middle of a hot zone. Rather, what bothers me is that people are underreacting. There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction that says that swine flu won't cause any sort of devastation; that it's not something to worry about.

The fact of the matter is that while they're probably right, there's no reason not to take simple precautions. So long as this is going on, I'll make sure to was my hands with soap and water after using the bathroom, to try to avoid sick people, and to go to health services if I start showing flu-like symptoms. On the other hand, I hear plenty of people at school saying that they don't care, that if they get it it's "just the flu." I see a lot of people here on /. saying that this is just a media circus and just for drug companies to capitalize on. Maybe you guys are right, but what if you aren't?

As I said, I'm biased since I'm in a hot zone, but I'd rather be safe about this than contract it.

Still Unknown Case Fatality Rate

[Baldrson]

There are basically 3 regimes of Case Fatality Rate separated by about a factor of 10 each:

1) more than 1%
2) .1% to 1%
3) less than .1%

We still don't know which range we're dealing with and, uh, like, it matters.

All it would take is to focus on a standard sample like Mexico City hospital interns, process their swabs STAT and count the deaths so far.

Seriously, folks, where are the adults?

Re:Patient zero? Yeah, right.

[LordKronos]

Mexico's response has been so disorganized they have no CLUE who "patient zero" is.

Yeah, the part I found especially interesting is, you've got this 5 year old with the swine flu, yet they test others in the town and it turns out this kid was the only person in town that contracted swine flu. Then they go and test the pig farm where they believe the kid may have contracted it from, and all the tests come back negative.

So you've got the original infection vector, but no identifiable source it could have been contracted from, and no identifiable recipients it could have been passed on to. Seems odd to me.

Re:Semi-Pandemic

[hurfy]

And this is the ONLY real story here.

If this is an average flu season at least a couple dozen kids in the US have died already from the standard A/B/whatever strains vs 1 for the swine flu.

I'll leave you to figure out i gave an very conservative guess according to the CDC. Mexico i have no clue.

It is still much more dangerous to cross the street for lunch, how about a banner to Stop for Pedestrians :(

Re:Doesn't scare me at all

[ChromaticDragon]

Sigh...

If only this were just funny.

I actually had this conversation with a friend a year ago or so. Of course, they didn't express a desire to relish in raw pork. And it was related to the Bird Flu. But pretty much dead on the same.

Their reasoning was that Bird Flu wasn't going to be an issue because it couldn't "evolve" the ability of human-to-human transmission because... evolution was a bunch of nonsense. And the media had lost interest by that time so my friend thought it had all just been overblown.

But H5N1 (Bird Flu) hasn't gone away at all. This H1N1 (Swine Flu) may be bad; it may not. But even if it has low mortality rate, if it spreads quickly far and wide, it may increase the chance H5N1 picks up human-to-human. That would be very bad indeed.

Re:Semi-Pandemic

[Khyber]

God I love my immune system and genetic oddities. I'm one of the few people that has the natural genetic resistance to HIV (descendant of Black Plague survivors) and my immune system is so strong I haven't touched a flu shot in over a decade and rarely get sick to begin with.

I won't need to be rich to survive! I just keep up my filthy habits that reinforce my immune system and laugh at the rich that need medication. As George Carlin said quite accurately: "Tempered in raw shit."

Yes, I used to play in sewers, quite often. Blowing shit up and hearing the reverberations go for minutes was a fave pasttime.

Evolution in action, folks. Watch closely!

Re:Semi-Pandemic

[dgatwood]

IMHO, it is several months too early to definitively conclude that this attacks healthy people harder, whether by cytokine storm or otherwise. Right now, all the people getting hit are young people because this is the very first wave of the illness. People who are most mobile and most social are most likely to be exposed first, so that's who we're seeing getting sick right now.

Almost all the people in the U.S. who have gotten sick are schoolchildren, but that's because they are the most mobile, once again. If you look at that in isolation, you might erroneously conclude that school-aged people in the U.S. are more vulnerable, when in reality, they were merely the first to be exposed.

Only when you look at the data over a long period of time in aggregate can you say for certain that it hits younger people harder. In a few months, if the pattern holds, then we know this resembles bird flu in its behavior. Initially, though, it could just as easily be blamed on mobility, greater probability of living alone (and not seeking health care early enough), or any number of other causes that have nothing (directly) to do with age.

The more interesting question, IMHO, is why there have been no U.S. deaths yet except for a small Mexican infant visiting this country. There are several possibilities:

• selection bias---often during the early stages of an outbreak, only the most serious cases get noticed because people ignore a mild case of flu. If only a few percent of all the swine flu cases in Mexico were actually reported, the numbers make a lot more sense.
• better medical care---Mexico did have shortages of flu medications initially, and this may have cost lives.
• better sanitation---Mexico has many areas with poor sanitation. People in those areas could easily experience much greater bacterial exposure there than they might experience in other places. Since deaths among young people from flu are generally caused by secondary bacterial infections, this could increase the risk significantly.
• better nutrition---Mexico has a much larger percentage of population living below the poverty line. Poor nutrition can contribute significantly to viral susceptibility.
• surprise---Initially, people didn't expect this sort of outbreak and this were less likely to treat this as a serious disease. Delayed treatment can sometimes make the difference between life and death.
• genetic immunity---Although most people these days are mutts genetically, Hispanic people do tend to have significantly greater genes from Spanish and Aboriginal American peoples than, for example, your average Caucasian does. Much as some descendants of plague survivors show immunity to HIV, it may be that some virus(es) that people were exposed to hundreds of years ago may have weeded out people with greater susceptibility to this virus in the ancestors of Caucasian populations, but not in the ancestors of Hispanic populations
• false positives---The number of swine flu confirmed deaths seems to be dropping. The latest I heard was 8, down from 20 two days ago. It is very possible that the tests initially used to determine the cause of death were wrong. It is also very possible that the person was exposed to swine flu but was sick from something else entirely. For example, somebody might get Ebola and on his/her death bed, might get exposed to swine flu. Guess which one killed that person....

It's way too early to say much about this so far. Right now, there's a lot of speculation and precious little accurate data.

Re:Please let it be!!

[Knutsi]

A Norwegian health authority official stated "our worst case scenario is that 1,4 million gets sick, 13.000 dies" then went on to underline this was the WORST case scenario, and it might even end up being nothing. What does the headlines say in the media? "13.000 might die!", and "1,4 million fall ill!". Why? To scare me? What kind of people are these editors and journalists?