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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."
Who does raise the swine flu threat level?
I get the feeling that Media outlets are DESPERATELY Hoping that this will be a Pandemic... as if they're bored or really really really like human suffering... oh wait, what's that saying about if it bleeds it's frontpage news? Sigh. --Ray PS> Would hate to die of Swine Flu, just because of what it's called... and all that it would imply if I caught it...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
""Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, the WHO raised the pandemic threat level for H1N1 "swine flu" to 5."
Wow. I knew they had good music but I did not know Peter Townshend was in charge of changing pandemic threat levels.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
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.
Qxe4
The media can do what they will with this non-story.
I'm safe - I don't believe in that e-vo-lution crap, so this new disease could not have evolved from swine! It's all just pig nonsense.
I'm going back to prepare a round of raw bacon sushi!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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
Bah, we all should know this "swine flu" is actually a well orchestrated distraction from our real threat.
ZOMBIES!
Fear not the Swine Flu pandemic. Fear instead the imminent Zombie pandemic.
Unless of course this is just phase 1...
"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.
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.
AccountKiller
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...
Are you adequate?
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
in the US alone there are An estimated 100,000 hospitalizations and about 20,000 deaths occur each year from the plain old flu or its complications... so what is the big deal?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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.)
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
The Stonecutters!
I was once a horse.
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.
Wow. You have just far too much faith in the governments of the world, and medicine
****
We've had one death so far in the U.S., and it was a baby. Two of the drugs that we do have available are effective, and I heard that there are roughly enough of those two to treat 30-50 million people in the U.S.
My comment wasn't about the people in the richer nations being so much better off so much as it being a commentary on the sad state of affairs where the poor get hit the hardest, like they do pretty much any time a disaster happens.
I don't have much faith in governments, but those populations without ANY modern medicine at all are going to suffer a large number of deaths. Be it from overactive immune systems or compromised ones - both extremes seem to be a problem in these sorts of situations.
In India, you have millions of people who are so poor that they burn garbage to keep warm. When droves of them start dying, secondary diseases and epidemics become a real worry as well. No, not everyone in India is like that, obviously, but with nearly a billion people all living in a pretty close proximity to each other, it's not likely that things will be good, either.
It's the Aporkalypse!
For example, Madagascar has just closed its seaport. And here I was, so close, to winning :(
1) more than 1% .1% to 1% .1%
2)
3) less than
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?
Seastead this.
Very true.
At this point we're just using hypotheses and another one that I just dreamed up is that ths strain needs a certain industrial polutants to be between certain points (sweet spot) for it to be lethal.
Since more people have caught it, and more people have died from it in Mexico, this is also plausible, since the polution levels are easily higher there than in the US and Europe.
I say plausible, but very unlikely, as I just came up with this halfassed idea. But if it ends up being true, I want credit!
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?
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That page is riddled with [citation needed]. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
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.
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.
This is how it always starts...
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
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 :(
Can you imagine any possible news story where you would not find it relevant to bring up Bush? Let it go already, it's over.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
And all organic.
As a bonus, it's "green". Anyone who succumbs to this will naturally reduce their carbon footprint.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Dr and Rose appear on a spaceship cunningly disguised as a planet only to find there's a mysterious disease that's killing spectacularly low numbers of people who all happen to live in the same city. Normally he wouldn't worry about it but Rose manages to get infected so the Dr raises the threat level to OMG. He works night and day to find a cure only to be forced to infect himself, die from the disease, but not really as his seemingly magic, but really explainable in materialistic terms, Time Lord powers cause him to regenerate in the form of Tom Baker.
He draws some of his own blood with his sonic screwdriver and, treats Rose, who makes a full recovery. As a gesture of good will, and for the episode to end on a relative high note (despite Tom Baker's haggard appearance), he takes the TARDIS into a low "earth" orbit and sprays the serum into the jet stream, thus curing and inoculating most of the world. The Dr and Rose leave for better times.
Just moments later the Vogons appear and destroy the world to make way for hyperspace bypass.
Swine flu is a horrible name.
I'm going to call it "bacon lung".
Everything's better with bacon.
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!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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:
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You call it swine flu.
I call it weaponized bacon.
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
The active word is still and we must see that it stays that way. When a person gets killed while crossing the road, he does not let 8 others cross the road to get killed and who then force others to get killed crossing the road.
The problem is that we do not know how dangerous it could become. 1 or even 100 cases (or more?) cases can be easily controlled and if that means 100 or 1000 people dying, that means nothing.
Look what happend in 1918 It is estimated that anywhere from 20 to 100 million people were killed worldwide. 20 million (when looking at the low numbers and not calculating a higher world population) would be a tad more then people who get killed crossing the road.
So we must not look at what happend, but what might happen. We just do not know how dangerous the wolf is and if we should cry wolf.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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]