Swine flu spreads in 10 US states, Europe

AP on Yahoo ^ | 4/29/09 | Lauran Neergaard - ap

[NormsRevenge]

WASHINGTON – Virulent swine flu spread to 10 U.S. states from coast to coast Wednesday and swept deeper into Europe, extending its global reach as President Barack Obama mourned the first U.S. death, a Mexican toddler who had traveled with his family to Texas. Total American cases surged to nearly 100, and Obama said wider school closings might be necessary.

The World Health Organization said the outbreak is moving closer to becoming a full-scale pandemic.

Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the organization's top flu expert, told reporters in Geneva that the latest developments are moving the agency closer to raising its pandemic alert to phase 5, indicating widespread human-to-human transmission. That's just one step below level 6, a full-fledged pandemic.

[Daffynition]

[Shyla]

Lol

Poor little swine.

[Dilbert San Diego]

I sure don’t remember ever seeing them make such a big deal about a flu outbreak. Is there more to the story? Is this strain of flu uniquely able to spread quickly? Is it more deadly? People die of flu every year. Some years we hear that it has been a bad flu season, but I’ve never seen actions taken such as closing schools and such.

[NormsRevenge]

www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pandemic

: occurring over a wide geographic area and affecting an exceptionally high proportion of the population

[DM1]

“I sure don’t remember ever seeing them make such a big deal about a flu outbreak. Is there more to the story? Is this strain of flu uniquely able to spread quickly? Is it more deadly? People die of flu every year. Some years we hear that it has been a bad flu season, but I’ve never seen actions taken such as closing schools and such.”

mainly i think it is because there has been no vaccinations at all due to the fact that this is a brand new strain

[tired1]

I just can’t get over feeling that this is just like the global warming crock of shit. OK, a few dozen folks over the globe die of the flu and it’s over, it’ll fizzle on it’s own.

Then the Kenyan and all his buddies get thousands more hours of airtime praise.

[GOPJ]

I sure don’t remember ever seeing them make such a big deal about a flu outbreak. Is there more to the story?

You're right - the concern level is waaaaay to high for the number of deaths. I think bad things are suspected - but the biggest problem is a very high "unknown" with this virus...

[Freedom2specul8]

"... President Barack Obama mourned ..."

yeah, he mourned as much as he was furious when he found out about AF1.

[MeanWestTexan]

1. If you believe the Mexican statistics, we have a 6% mortality rate, which is pretty dramatic when compared to the 1918 flu, which had a 2.5% mortality rate.

2. Being a rather novel flu , it will spread to more people, as there is no resistance (unless you happen to be a pig farmer who has caught pig flu before). Thus, even with a comprable mortality rate, more will die (same percentage of a bigger pie).

Assuming most people catch this — again assuming little resistance -— having 2% or so of the population die is a pretty big deal.

That’s 6,000,000 people — be like a nuclear bomb hitting Los Angeles and wiping it out, to put it into perspective.

[rwfromkansas]

The media is starting to call this “North American Flu” despite the fact it’s now all over the world.

We just finished an argument in my newroom over whether to call it that or swine flu and decided to use both terms in articles since now that’s what officials are calling it to be more politically correct.

It’s getting ridiculous.

[rwfromkansas]

A lot of it is that there aren’t vaccines for it.

That will increase the susceptability of the virus.

[dfwgator]

It should be called the “Chicago Flu.”

[dianed]

“I sure don't ever remember seeing them make such a big deal about a flu outbreak.”..........

It is because we have no immunity to this new virus which is made up of 4 different viral components from Europe and Asia which have never been seen together before.

The 1918 flu epidemic began very quietly in Kansas and mutated to be a deadly killer of between 50-100 million people in an 18 month period. More than all of the deaths due to 3 years of the Bubonic Plague combined.

http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/

There are some people that believe this was intentionally created and released....

http://www.oxysilver.com/mexican_flu_2009-special_report_by_dr._leonard_horowitz.pdf

I don't know what to think about that but... it seems like a infinitesimally small chance that this could have occurred naturally from what I've been reading.

[Shyla]

Totally ridiculous.

[MeanWestTexan]

“I think bad things are suspected - but the biggest problem is a very high “unknown” with this virus.”

My doctor golf buddy (a pediatrician) told me today the issue is that pretty much every person exposed catches this strain.

We have no resistance, because it’s new.

If it gets going, pretty much EVERYONE gets it.

Assuming a 2% mortality, 300,000,000 in the USA, do the math.

[Reagan69]

Yawn.

They are REALLY, REALLY, REALLY trying to make this a news event.

[TurtleUp]

Total American cases surged to nearly 100, and Obama said wider school closings might be necessary.

One hundred cases out of 3 hundred million citizens? That's one case in 3 million people. I'd say that if public education isn't valuable enough to justify that level of risk in a disease that is rarely fatal, it's time to permanently close those schools - because they're failures, not because of the disease.

On the bright side, the less we educate our children, the more likely they are to contribute to a permanent democrat majority.

[Daffynition]

It's the flu...don't panic. GEESH.

[bdeaner]

I sure don’t remember ever seeing them make such a big deal about a flu outbreak. Is there more to the story? Is this strain of flu uniquely able to spread quickly? Is it more deadly? People die of flu every year. Some years we hear that it has been a bad flu season, but I’ve never seen actions taken such as closing schools and such.

This isn't your average, garden variety flu virus. It is a Type A virus, the kind that can lead to a pandemic, and in this case, will almost certainly become a pandemic. Secondly, it is an odd mixture of four strains of virus of swine, avian and human origins. Third, those most at risk of mortality are people in their prime -- 25-45 years of age -- rather than the young and old, the usual vulnerable populations in the case of the normal flu virus. This is unusual, and has only been seen a few times over the past century.

The pattern is similar to the 1918 Spanish flu that killed more people than WWI or the bubonic plague. The current "swine flu" fits the pattern in many ways, but may not turn out to be as lethal (but could yet turn out to be just as if not more lethal). If it were to follow a similar trajectory as the 1918 flue, we'd see something like 2-6 million deaths in the U.S. alone, wheres a typical flu seasons sees a mortality rate of around 35,000 deaths. Big difference. Also, since this would be a global virus, that would pretty much just be the tip of the iceberg -- there would be millions of deaths around the world.

Hopefully this virus will not achieve the same level of mortality as the 1918 Spanish flu -- which was an unusually lethal virus. But one thing seems for certain, the virus is here to stay, and a pandemic is pretty much already upon us.