Posted on 08/28/2009 4:46:26 PM PDT by Brugmansian
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Doctors are reporting a severe form of swine flu that goes straight to the lungs, causing severe illness in otherwise healthy young people and requiring expensive hospital treatment, the World Health Organisation said on Friday.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Proton pump inhibitors have an entirely different mechanism than H2 inhibitors. This makes them better for controlling excess stomach acid, but not for the purpose at hand, fending off ARDS.
Much of the effort to stop ARDS will be based on luck, finding the right combination of major cytokine elements to settle down. Hopefully the right combination can be found in common OTC drugs.
Staying One Step Ahead of Swine Flu Surge
D.C. Officials Prepare for Health Challenges Posed by Living in Congested Urban Centers
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Nurses at community clinics are being fitted for respirators. Universities are placing hand sanitizers in dormitory lobbies. Hospitals are preparing to screen and separate patients at emergency rooms. Businesses are setting up phone trees so they can operate with up to a third of their employees out sick.
All are signals that swine flu is expected to come roaring back with the cooler weather of autumn. Although the H1N1 strain of the influenza virus has proven to be mild to moderate so far, local officials are preparing in case it rebounds more strongly.
Urban areas such as the District, where about 100 people have been confirmed with the H1N1 virus since spring, face a distinct set of challenges.
Crowds, for instance, increase the chance of getting the flu.
“All urban areas are at risk,” said John Williams, vice president for health affairs at George Washington University. “We’re all huddled together — on Metro, on the bus, in stadiums and theaters. That’s a perfect breeding ground.”
District residents, like those of most big cities, have high rates of asthma, diabetes, HIV and obesity, all of which can increase the severity of symptoms in patients who catch the flu, whether seasonal or H1N1. Several of the diseases, including diabetes and asthma, disproportionately affect minorities.
“There is a lot of poverty-associated illness in major cities,” said James M. Chamberlain, chief of emergency medicine at Children’s National Medical Center. “Asthma, diabetes, HIV are all more common in cities. The District is exactly like other cities.”
Influenza can exacerbate asthma, particularly in children, because viral infections create mucus that clogs their narrow airways more severely than in adults. In Boston, for example, half of the 71 people hospitalized with swine flu in the spring had asthma. About 11,000 children and 40,000 adults in the District have asthma, more than 36,000 residents have diabetes, 15,000 have HIV or AIDS, 1,800 have end-stage renal disease and more than 11,000 have heart disease, according to Department of Health statistics. The children with asthma visit emergency rooms up to five times more than the national average, said Stephen J. Teach, associate chief of emergency medicine at Children’s.
“We don’t know how it will unfold,” Teach, a specialist in pediatric asthma, said about swine flu. “Right now, there’s no reason for excessive worry. It’s right to be concerned. It’s right to plan. It’s right to be informed. But it’s not a time to be overly concerned until we have a little more data and experience.”
People with underlying conditions affecting the lungs or immune system will have priority to receive the swine flu vaccine, along with young people, pregnant women, caregivers and first responders. About 225,000 of the District’s 590,000 residents are estimated to be in priority groups. In Maryland, 2.9 million of the state’s 5.6 million residents fall into such groups; Virginia estimates that 2.5 million of its 7.6 million residents have priority standing. Nationally, 159 million people do.
“We have plans in place to allow us to vaccinate the medically frail population in a timely manner as medication comes in,” said Pierre Vigilance, D.C. Health Department director.
The department has provided N95 respirators, which filter 95 percent of particulates, to health care workers at primary-care clinics throughout the city, said Beverly Pritchett, head of the emergency preparedness administration. It also has stockpiled thousands of surgical masks and doses of the antiviral medications Tamiflu and Relenza. In a flu outbreak, callers to the 311 government services number seeking information on the flu would be directed to a unit specializing in advice on the flu and the vaccines, which will be available through private physicians and mass vaccination clinics.
http://ow.ly/15MXIL
Cindy added me to an unemployment ping list....
We will ask her to add you to the list.
It is a hard time to be unemployed and I will keep you and your husband in my prayers as well.
Hi azkathy and liberty rocks.
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/lookingforajob/index?tab=articles
I don’t have a ping list, but you are free to bookmark the current thread and watch for updates:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2306857/posts
...and/or peruse the prior thread which still includes good links and interesting reading:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2136635/posts
As always, keep up with H1N1 update stories on this thread: H1N1 flu victim collapsed on way to hospital [Latest H1N1 updates downthread] thanks to DvdMom and others.
David Horowitz
Thought you might enjoy the tag...
I'm glad that's the worst part of it! Of course, this will hit the poor and minorities the hardest.
I am taking generic tagamet (1 in am, 1 in pm), advil (3 in am 3 at night) & benadryl (2 every 4-6 hours) along with 10,000iu vit D3 and so far it is working...day 3 and I still have a large swollen knot in my slightly sore throat but otherwise okay. Day 1 was the worse - severe headache, aches, malaise and rapid soft tissue swelling of the upper respiratory tract, couldn’t even sit up. I feel a slight coolness in the trachea but have had that since day 1 and it hasn’t progressed. I had been taking 5000 ius vit D before I caught this.
97% of so of the people who caught the flu didn’t die during the pandemic of 1918-1920. Even a pandemic such as that one would create incredible havoc now.
The media is already starting up:
Swine flu sends more blacks, Hispanics to hospital
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2325842/posts
400% "more". I'm not buying it. I can see 20%, maybe 50% but blacks and hispanics are not 4x more likely to end up in a hospital because of this disease. There must be another factor.
When I was five, we moved to a house much farther than town as the owner of the small house where we lived in town wanted to move back in; it was right after WWII ended and and troops were returning in waves, creating a demand for rental units.
We ended up so far out that the house my dad found had only electricity and gas heat but no running water.
This meant that all our drinking water came from a pump mounted on a platform about chest-high for me and it became my job to supply fresh water to the kitchen for my grandmother who watched over my sister and me.
Actually, I rather enjoyed it and soon became quite good at the task as it was but about five to six feet from the back porch which could be watched from the kitchen where my grandma stood sentinel; pump, pump, pump I would reach up to my tippy toes and weight down the old rusty handle as the cool water splashed upon my flushed face.
Day after day this went on, rain or shine and after a few weeks the leaves began to turn from glossy green to crinkly yellow and then a splotchy brown with a red blaze here and there like cherries floating in a bowl of chocolate milk and potato chips.
One morning my grandma handed me a sweater and had me pull it over my head before she wiped the frost from the inside of the glass on the window above the sink so she could watch my daily draw; out I went and with a mighty pull, my hands slipped off and down I went, bouncing from board to stone to midnight sharpened hard, cold frost.
The handle was stuck! It wouldn’t move at all; I skulked back inside, tears in my eyes and told my grandma the pump had broke. To my dismay she began to chuckle and cluck in that old hen way I had seen in church sometimes when that girl with the pokeberry lips went swishing by.
“No, no” she said, ‘it’s not broke, it just froze in place’ and with that she lifted a teapot from the stove and led me back outside to where she showed me what had to be done when things go from bad to worse as so often happens when winter sets in.
We thawed the pump and left it to freeze anew until the next time we needed more and had to do it again.
Over sixty years I’ve pumped as things go from bad to worse as so often happens when winter sets in but pump I must, til spring begins.
“Day after day this went on, rain or shine and after a few weeks the leaves began to turn from glossy green to crinkly yellow and then a splotchy brown with a red blaze here and there like cherries floating in a bowl of chocolate milk and potato chips.”
I have a photo of me at the pump with just such a colorful scene surrounding me! Thanks for the fond memory that you captured so well and the life lesson.
Has anybody answered the following questions:
How did the current swine flu virus come to possess genetic material from swine, avian, and human flu strains?
That seems unlikely to happen in nature, did someone release (accidental or otherwise) a bio-engineered strain?
Regards,
GtG
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