Posted on 07/02/2009 8:17:26 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Swine flu cannot be stopped as 100,000 new cases per day feared
David Rose
More than 100,000 swine flu cases could be diagnosed every day by the end of next month, the Health Secretary has warned. Britain has moved past the stage of trying to contain the spread of the virus and into the “treatment phase”, Andy Burnham told the House of Commons.
Cases of the H1N1 virus were doubling each week in Britain and could reach six figures daily by the end of August if current trends continued, he added. Anyone with flu-like symptoms will be advised to stay at home and telephone their GP for advice. Doctors have warned that “several million” people could become ill as the flu season returns in autumn and winter.
Mr Burnham emphasised that most people who had become infected with the virus had developed only mild symptoms but widespread disruption to the economy is expected as people take days off work with flu.
A vaccine for the H1N1 strain, which has spread across the world, is understood to be at an advanced stage of development and could start becoming available as early as next month.
Now that the country is in the treatment phase, the policy of closing schools will be stopped and suspected cases of flu will be diagnosed by doctors assessing their symptoms rather than by a laboratory test. From now on, doctors will also use the drug Tamiflu (oseltamivir) more selectively, giving it only to people with symptoms rather than anyone who has come into contact with a swine flu victim.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Ping!
Sweet what do we tax
Funny how this is not news anymore........
How many people have actually died from this? Despite all the hysteria, very few.
IIRC its like 127 in the US that have died....this year
In an AVERAGE flu season, 150 die in the US...A DAY
As it spreads far and wide, the chances of deadly mutation would go higher.
Tiger, you have it completely backasswards. Viruses always trend towards becoming milder not more virulent. Biologically, virulence is self-limiting. Kill the host, you die too. So much for being able to spread your virulence.
The milder flu is genetically more successful, so it wins in the end.
The only way to spread true virulence is to do it intentionally, by human intervention. I will let you fill in the blanks.
It will die out eventually as Spanish flu did. Virulent one thrives when it can spread to next hosts quickly and easily before it kill original hosts.
Virulent mass killing virus is a transitory phenomenon, but it has to show up somewhere. If the host sample size is big, the odds of actual occurrence, even a single one, would be going up. I was simply talking about this elementary statistical observation.
Virulence is self-limiting in the long-term, but in the short-term, it could be different. Things can tend toward relatively benign long-term equilibrium but the path to get there could be far less benign.
“The only way to spread true virulence is to do it intentionally, by human intervention. I will let you fill in the blanks.”
Reading this might help them too.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2281436/posts
"It could get better, or it could get worse."And there you have it.
“Biologically, virulence is self-limiting. Kill the host, you die too. So much for being able to spread your virulence.”
Never thought of that. Thanks for the microbiology lesson.
It is also possible that those who have contracted the present form of the virus will gain some immunity even to a later mutation that is more virulent.
OTOH, the UK health authorities must be worried if they have, up til now, been giving Tamiflu to those exposed. I would have thought that they would invoke cost effectiveness to limit it to those with symptoms. However, I am unsure about Tamiflu’s overall effectiveness as a preventive. My understanding, which is limited to popular media reports,is that it can lessen symptoms, not prevent actual development of the flu. Is that incorrect? What is the effect on the transmission capabilities of H1N1 of giving Tamiflu early?
I read early on that the present variant was a bird/swine/human hybrid. Then there was a flood of reports stating that no avian component was found. I stopped following the news, even ProMed, once it was obvious that this was a very mild influenza. Do you know what the current assessment is, as to genetic elements contained in this H1N1? Again, I am just an interested layperson, but some articles make a lot of the fact that a tri-species genetic component indicated
bio-engineering. Can you add anything to that?
Depends on the contagious incubation period....
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