2,000 students at Washington State University report flu symptoms
physorg.com
physorg.com
I work as an ER nurse, and hospitals all over are expecting a huge influx of patients. It's going to be a miserable winter for me. :( The CDC is expecting 50% of the population to come down with it, close to a million hospitalizations and 90,000 deaths in the US alone. This out break already meets the WHO definition of pandemic flu.
Most people that come down with it have a bad case of the sniffles, a cough and feel miserable for a while. But the problem with this virus is that it randomly hits younger people (age 25-50) really hard and sends them to the ICU. We've had 10-12 young people in our ICU this summer on ventilators with H1N1. Two of those people were pregnant mothers.
<PSA> So, get your flu and swine flu shots this year. Wash your hands. Sneeze or cough into your elbow instead of your hands. If you're sick, for the love of health, please stay home and isolate yourself instead of sharing your germs with your coworkers. And, if you're having a hard time breathing, come to the ER sooner rather than later. </PSA>
Seems like most people in the UK have had a mild case of swine flu now, and it was pretty boring (I believe myself and my family had mild case of swine flu a month or so ago - we stayed at home, felt a bit rubbish for a few days, then got better).
Is it really worth getting jabs for this? (Unless you're pregnant or have other medical issues). Is it really worth trying to isolate it?
On the grand scale of things, the number of people likely to die from it seems miniscule compared to other threats.
PS (When I started to type "myself" above, my fingers actually typed "mysql"! Hate it when that happens :/ )
What are other threats are you thinking of?
What other diseases are estimated to cause half the US population to be infected, one million hospitalizations, and 90,000 deaths? Even if most people who get it are fine after a few days, it's a pretty big deal if half the population is going to come down with it; H1N1 sure is going to get a lot of chances to kill even if it's not so deadly for any one individual.
The same people who own the pharma companies were involved in the propaganda of WMDs in Iraq, most notably Donald Rumsfeld who is the owner of the Tamiflu selling company.
I'm not saying that people should panic about the flu, but good handwashing, getting vaccinated and not exposing others to your germs is just good common sense, and it's what our best current science says.
If you get the vaccine you might still get sick, but if you do, it's usually less severe. And, we all get the benefit of herd immunity from large scale vaccinations programs.
Why? If this thing is a contagious as it seems to be, there is no point in doing this. Pretty much everyone is going to get it from one source or another.
Let's fight useful battles, instead of making everyone think they are doing some good, when they are doing nothing effective.
You're saying it could be? Going back to the doctor tomorrow, but I'm surprised to hear your description of the symptoms - it is not what my doctor suggested, and it fits with what I've had.
The symptoms are ridiculously vague. The test was like "Do you have 2 or more of the following? [fever, cough, cold, sore throat, etc].
I'd ask for a specific test to be sure what it is.
A few weeks ago Santa Clara County Department of Health told us that 99% of all flu like symptoms in the area are H1N1. There just aren't too many other bugs going around right now, at least in Silicon Valley.
That being said, getting swabbed really doesn't do much for you. It lets you tell your friends, "I had swine flu", but not much else. Tamiflu helps a little bit, but only if you take it in the first 2 days of symptoms. So, you're pretty much screwed. Sorry.
If you start to cough up colored goo, or have a hard time breathing by all means go to see the Bone Saw again.
I did not have ANY GI symptoms, though. Or high fever, so they weren't too concerned.
There is a hacking virus thing going around here that isn't H1N1, and I think I had that.
In any case, I'm rapidly improving now. Even getting some hearing back in my right ear.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/pos...
"The overwhelming majority of our patients have had mild symptoms and are usually better in three to five days," the university said. None of the WSU cases have been fatal.
I think a lot of people are confusing Swine Flu with Bird Flu in their mind and freaking out. Swine Flu may lead to more cases of the flu this season but it's still just the Flu. Assuming you don't have another underlying condition you should be fine with rest and chicken soup.
Why this thing is tracked and scientists take it very seriously is that influenza can rapidly mutate and H1N1 _could_ become much more virulent than it is today. The extremely deadly 1918 flu had a first wave that behaves like most flu outbreaks before coming back and killing tens of millions of people.
That doesn't mean that will happen this time or that people should get panicky. Catching H1N1 in its current state is probably beneficial because it would confer stronger immunity to what might be a family of influenza that could be around for a while, but its spread is newsworthy. If the news leads to more people staying home when they are sick, even if the symptoms are more minor for them, and we get more herd immunity through increased vaccinations, that's a good thing.
EDIT: I just wanted to emphasis that vaccination is definitely preferable to catching the actual disease, even if the latter would give strong immunity to future, similar strains.
You could say that about almost anything including the common cold, could you not?
Turns out I had bronchitis(hooray for antibiotics), but it was fairly scary how quickly H1N1 is spreading. It's not too deadly, but seems to be very infectious.
"Because if it does become more deadly, it could cause a very severe scenario"
It could, but it does NOT. Swine flu is by far less deadly than seasonal flu. In Germany we have 15k swine flu cases and not a single death in 4 months. In contrast there care 20k flu related deaths in Germany each year.
"20k flu related deaths in Germany each year"
Yes, 20k deaths obviously refers to seasonal flu. 20k deaths OUT OF HOW MANY CASES? No information. So we don't know the death rate for ordinary seasonal flu. So we don't know just how the rates for swine flu and ordinary seasonal flu compare.
(Of course we know -- assuming your numbers are right -- that the observed death rate for swine flu is zero. But we don't know, e.g., whether the death rate for seasonal flu is so low that a figure of zero would be unsurprising even if swine flu were worse than typical seasonal flu.