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WHO Says Swine Flu May Have Peaked In the US
Hugh Pickens writes "The World Health Organization says that there were 'early signs of a peak' in swine flu activity in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including the US. The American College Health Association, which surveys more than 250 colleges with more than three million students, said new flu cases had dropped 27 percent in the week ending on November 13th from the week before, the first drop since school resumed in the fall. Nonetheless, Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of vaccination and respiratory disease at the CDC, chose her words carefully. 'We are in better shape today than we were a couple of weeks ago,' she says. 'I wish I knew if we had hit the peak. Even if a peak has occurred, half the people who are going to get sick haven't gotten sick yet.' Privately, federal health officials say they fear that if they concede the flu has peaked, Americans will become complacent and lose interest in getting vaccinated, increasing the chances of another wave. However, Dr. Lone Simonsen, a former CDC epidemiologist, says she expects a third wave in December or January, possibly beginning in the South again. Based on death rates in New York City and in Scandinavia, Simonsen argues that both 1918 and 1957 had mild spring waves followed by two stronger waves, one in fall and one in midwinter, adding that in the pandemic of 1889, the bulk of the deaths occurred in the third wave. 'If people think it's going away, they can think again.'"
Who says it? Well, it wasn't me.
WHO. Who? WHO. Who? I really wanna know!
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Apparently the "terrorist" threat is getting old and worn out, so now the media and politicians have to trumpet the "pandemic" threat.
I wonder what next week's threat will be. Maybe it'll come back to "communists" again.
'who says'? 'In the us'?
How long before this is a pre existing condition?
Isn't the peak something that you talk about later when you are analyzing the data? Of what relevance is it to discuss a peak in this current cycle?
I'm somehow sceptic about the whole hype around the swine flu based on the fact that the U.S. Government alone paid nearly a billion $ for the vaccine http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/07/13/daily26.html, much more globally. I mean, the swine flu is even less hazardous than the normal flu, and with some good care for the immune system it does not cause much problems, so is it really necessary to spread a big panic and spend that amount of money? I mean, that's a lot of money. Really.
...we're *not* all gonna die? Shocking, I tell you, shocking.
You can't know something has peaked or bottomed out until way after the fact. It's like having a sign of relief when in the eye of a hurricane or ignoring the possibility of aftershocks from earthquakes.
Here in Canada, my doctor said yesterday that he is seeing a drop in people coming in with flu symptoms. It used to be more in the past few weeks.
Also, Google Flu Trends shows a marked drop. In the USA, there is a drop too.
I have also observed less absence at my little kid's school as well.
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Not sure why this story is on slashdot. We never leave our parent's basements, after all.
We are still struggling to find the real effects of vaccination in The Netherlands. Many people think they shouldn't bother.
So are there any statistics about fatality rate of swine flu versus 'regular' flu and also vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated?
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Interestingly, Google Flu Trends shows similar signs, although there the peak already occured in October.
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OK, peak oil is bad enough. But now also peak swine flu? Imagine the effects on the vaccine producers!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'd be a lot more inclined to believe a well proven theory than simply looking at the history of past epidemics. With so much talk about history predicting the present, it indicates to me that the knowledge of how epidemics work and how viruses mutate is extremely poor. As an example, we can fairly accurately predict where a hurricane will move in the next few days, but I've never heard anyone say "well, in 1992 Hurricane Andrew went west, then south, then east. It's possible Hurricane XYZ might take a similar route!"
What WOULD be an interesting historical perspective would be comparing deaths, hospitalizations, etc of H1N1 with past pandemics. This wouldn't be predictive in any meaningful way, but it would put this pandemic in perspective. Obviously this is nothing compared to 1918, but how does it compare to the 1957-1958, or the 1968-1969 pandemics? Was the media response as crazy then as it is today? That might actually be very informative, rather than these nonsense largely ignorance based "predictions".
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They did horrible things, e.g. killing the electric car, Sgt Pepper, ...
no statistics at all
CBS News, the New York Times, and other publications suggest that your skepticism is correct: Be skeptical about flu reports. There appears to be manipulation of government warnings to increase profit for vaccine makers.
I'm not sure about the Netherlands but the US uses the vaccine adverse event reporting system to track all vaccine associated illness and its public ally available....the side effects seem to be about the same as most seasonal flu shots.
So glad to hear it. Pay no attention to the mutated Tamiflu resistant versions that were reported in both Norway and North Carolina just yesterday.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This year I was diagnosed as being immune-compromised after having had pneumonia four times from February to June. They haven't shipped very much H1N1 vaccine to New Mexico, and it doesn't seem like any of it has made it to the southern part of the state where I live. Fortunately people like me with immune disorders have been recategorized as being in the priority group when vaccine does become available. If we're past the peak, then maybe people won't clamor as much for the vaccine and I'll have a better shot at getting inoculated as I must have the shot, can't have the nasal vaccine.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Well, the regular flu on average kills 30,000 per year in the US. The swine flu was projected to START at 40,000 and go as high at 100,000.
So far the swine flu has only killed 4,000.
And I bet there will be no coverage on how many die from the regular flu this season.
It might very well be a local peak (temporally speaking). For instance, see the shape of the flu progression in France, which was characterized by a peak in September. Now, it is rising again.
Oh no, we are going to be discouraged from getting the vaccine that it looks like there is no hope of many of us getting anyway?!?! It took weeks for me to finally get my kids vaccinated and so far, in SLC,Ut anyway, there is no sign that I will be getting the vaccine for weeks or more anyway. It's going to be tough getting my kids their booster also. This has really been a disaster in distribution. Thank goodness this strain isn't as deadly as the 1918 one. Hopefully the CDC is learning something from this.
oil just peaked recently as well. I think unemployment is next.
So it's taken 2 months to get over entropy caused by the return to school, just in time for the entropy caused by everyone traveling home for thanksgiving to take over.
I suspect that the infection rate is about to soar again.
Did anyone else read the title as the latest hit from Baha Men?
And so if we DID just watch the peak go by, that would imply a total of about 8,000 once the tail passes.
For fuck's sake, people, swine flu is not a problem.
It is the flu. It is annoying. It is contagious. It might kill you if you already have pneumonia, and it might kill you if you are really young. This is normal behavior for the flu. It came from pigs, and this does not make a single god damned bit of difference.
My current statistics is that in Norway a little over 20 people have died - most with complicating diseases - while 2-300 die each year in traffic accidents. In other words, I find it completely and utterly blown out of any proportion and there's probably not enough deaths to make decent statistics, not unless you gather all of them worldwide. I'm not getting vaccinated, and honestly they could have skipped the whole damn thing. Yes, some more people would lose a week's worth of work but they'd handle the flu and recover naturally, making them stronger. If and only if there is a much deadlier strain would I consider it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Our whole family just had H1N1 and yet none of us could get a vaccine beforehand, not even our 2 year old daughter. If vaccine was available, all of us would have gotten it. To top the confusion, the doctor is still asking us to get the shot when it becomes available. Give me a frigging break.
Now what amazes me is that our daughter coughed for 2 days and then she was fine, while we are still sick after 3 weeks. Daycares must create some kind of mutant immune systems that put interspecies viruses to shame.
given that I have spent nearly 6 weeks in Hospital this year of which the majoriy was for Swine Flu I can't really see your point.
I've got Leukaemia. This means my immune system is shot to hell. At then of may, I basically didn't have one and kept infecting myself. Then in Sept, I got Swine Flu which developed into Pneumonia. I can tell you it is not very nice.
I got the Flu because someone sneezed on me while waiting at a supermarket queue. Thats all it takes and ...
Normal people with normal immune systems can shake it off pretty easily but there are huge parts of the polulation that don't have normal immune systems.
Recovering from the flu naturally makes you stronger? Are you basing it on that ludicrous notion that "anything that doesn't kill us makes us stronger?" You have some supporting evidence? Because the vaccine causes antibodies to form just like the disease would - but without the debilitating symptoms that prevent you from say working out or anything for several days. I'd think the people who went about their business without getting sick should prove "stronger" than ones who were mostly bedridden for a few days.
I've personally gotten the seasonal flu vaccine for the last 8 years (ever since my corporate medical department said I needed to get it before a trip to Singapore in November of 2001). It's free here though, so cost to me isn't part of the equation. But I haven't had the flu in 8 years. That betters my prior averages by quite a bit (I previously got it about every other or every third year).
Of course, there isn't enough of the H1N1 vaccine here, so I haven't gotten that - although my kids qualified so they got it and the seasonal one. I just got the seasonal.
I can tell you one effect: I had the regular flu shot for eight years here in The Netherlands with no incidents including this year. Then I had the first shot against the new flu on Monday evening and I've had high fever for two days already (Friday and Saturday). Now I'm afraid I might pass it to my family so indeed I feel I should not have bothered.
I wonder how bad the seasonal flu wave will be this year. With all the excitement about swine flu, seasonal flu vaccinations seem to be forgotten.
I've been undergoing cancer treatment for the past five years and usually get the shot to reduce the chance of getting the flu while I'm busy fighting something else. But this year my oncologist's office ran out of the vaccine between my monthly checkups. My backup plan is to get the shot at work or a drugstore, but I haven't seen any information about those clinics this year.
I won't be surprised if many people get the swine flu vaccine (or try to get it and fail), then figure they've taken care of the biggest threat and forget to prepare for seasonal flu.
The president of China, that's who.
We had a 1976 "pandemic" too. They called it off when 10 people got Guillian-Barre syndrome from the vaccinations. 25 have this time, and they haven't called it off yet. In neither case was morbidity or mortality of the 'swine flu' greater than that of common variants.
I've seen good evidence that someone innoculated against H1N1 only won't get it. I've seen none that shows they can't carry it. I've seen some that suggests those who get the "seasonal" vaccine only are more likely to get H1N1. There's enough "seasonal" vaccine for most everyone who wants it. H1N1 vaccine is going to run out before 30 million doses. Dispensing both until supply or demand dictates otherwise would therefore tend to perpetuate the H1N1 'pandemic'.
The physicians I've questioned agreed that the sole difference between "seasonal" and H1N1 is that the latter has no effective treatment. The sole effective treatment for "seasonal" is Tamiflu at US$90 per regimen. I hypothesize that if there were a $90 treatment regimen for H1N1, there wouldn't be a vaccine.
My friend got sick with some flu-like symptoms, but far more unlike flu. She went to her doctor and got tested for flu. It was negative. That was to be expected since she'd had the vaccine from his office. He prescribed Tamiflu anyway. $90 later she was sicker. So was I. A week and bottle of Keflex later our bronchitis was gone, and all it cost us in medications both helpful and not, office visits and lost income was $1500 plus half her allotted sick days for a year. The doctor's response when asked how he could justify treating something that wasn't there and charging for it was an ingratiating smile wrapped around a "Well, you're not sick anymore are you? OK then." My diagnosis and bottle of Keflex were both free from the VA, making the implication he did something right all the more galling.
Just a guess, but I'm thinking that the vaccine left her immunosuppresed while she developed the flu antibody load and made her susceptible to the bronchitis. I haven't seen anything from CDC on other morbidities subsequent to flu vaccines.
I also haven't fully wrapped my head around the 2006 patent for attenuated H1N1 apparently intended for preparing a vaccine for a pandemic (specified as such in the patent) when there was no sign of one occurring. Good guessing maybe. That doesn't address why the previous Big Scare, H5N1 (bird flu) produced no patent, vaccine, or pandemic.
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Doctor Who of course.
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The CDC has, somewhere buried on its site that I found a month or so back some states about the mortality rates, sorry I'm not going to bother to find you a link but if you look hard enough google will for you.
Summary:
This strain of H1N1 seasonal a. AKA the swine flu:
Mortality rate of %0.05
The standard average over the last 50 years or so for the seasonal strains combined is %0.16
So last year, 3 times more people would have died from the flu last year than this year. Total deaths accounted to it will be higher, EVERYONE is reporting when they get the flu this year do to paranoia caused by media FUD. Most of these people die from complications with other illness. These people in past years wouldn't have been counted as flu deaths because the level of 'awareness' was far lower. People just didnt' think to account it to the flu directly.
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Since when did The Who start making announcements about flu pandemics? Is this like a PSA with celebrity endorsements?
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In Canada Swine Flu/H1N1 has become the dominant flu strain circulating representing 99.2% of all flu cases diagnosed. This is good news as 5,000 Canadians died last year from the seasonal flu while this year only 250 have died from flu since April. If 4,500 less people will die from flu this year, it makes you wonder what all the panic was over?
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Not that long. I was denied coverage from Kaiser Permanente recently for getting the flu in April and seeking treatment. Thank god that my company's plan cover me.
I may be putting words into your mouth, but you are not confusing contagious with deadly are you? It is just that you say:
of the 152 people who supposedly died from it (which is what made people thinkit was highly contagious)
No insult intended, but to avoid confusion I would say that a disease can be contagious without being deadly since the word "contagious" means "can be spread from an infected person to a non-infected person". Colds are contagious, but not deadly, HIV is not skin-contact contagious, but deadly.
WHO says?
sorry, someone had to..