As toll mounts, researchers peer into the H1N1 death spiral | Hacker News Reader

As toll mounts, researchers peer into the H1N1 death spiral

theglobeandmail.com

27 pointscwan18 comments

We've been seeing tons of it at the ER where I moonlight. Last week at triage I cared for 10-15 that I suspected had swine flu. The vast majority of those people have cold symptoms: cough, runny nose, fever, chills, etc... But, every now and then, it strikes like lightning and a young person has an overwhelming immune response to the disease and their lungs fill up and they crap out.

I saw a person die of swine flu last week. Right after that, I discharged 3 people with swine flu symptoms. It's a strange little disease. Get the vaccine if you can, and at very least get the regular flu vaccine. It may give you a partial immunity. The more people in the herd we can get immunized, the better off everyone is going to be. I don't get to worried about it, though.

There's always a worry about a recurrence of the "pandemic flu of 1918", and the H1N1 outbreak meets the definitions of pandemic. But, when the media talks about the pandemic of 1918, they forget the medicine has changed just a little bit in the last 90 years. For instance:

-Oxygen wasn't really in regular use until the 1920's-30's. -Germ theory had only gotten widespread acceptance for 20-30 years. -Antibiotics weren't mass produced until Sulfa in 1936. Before then, a lot of people died that could have been cured with a shot of penicillin or sulfa. -IV medications were given with glass syringes and recycled needles until the 70's.

I'm sure a large percentage of the 50 million people that died in the 1918 pandemic would have lived with basic modern medical care.

There was a New York Times article recently that highlighted some research that claimed that the new "wonder drug" Asprin added to the death toll at the time, as it prescribed in far too high of quantities.

Yeah, it took the medical community a while to figure out what the appropriate dose of aspirin was. And, even then, it took us until the early 1990's to figure out that you really shouldn't give it to people under the age of 25 who have a fever because of the risk of Reye's syndrome.

This indicates that a good preventative measure would be to calm down your immune system through diet...

http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com/2009/05/swine-flu-and-...

Also, buying a humidifier might help:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090209205148.ht...

The number of H1N1 cases has decreased steadily in the last two weeks. Maybe by "spiral" they mean "spiral downwards."

Source?

http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com/

Compared to early November, it looks like the number of new cases has decreased.

That map is really interesting!

Reminds me of the map in Edward Tufte's classic Visual Display of Quantitative Information. In the 1800s a doctor, John Snow, mapped out where all the deaths were happening in London from an epidemic. All of them centered around one well in the city and it's contaminated water turned out to be the source of the problem.

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/images/snowmap_1854-lar...

Steven Berlin Johnson - The Ghost Map: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594482691

I don't think that's map correct. I didn't hear anything about a MASSIVE spike in deaths on the 25th.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=585993

"So far, 309 people have died across Canada"

...

"it is reminiscent of 1918, when upward of 50 million worldwide died"

SHRUG

This is a legitimate reaction. I'm having trouble finding references on my iPhone, but I've heard that the standard seasonal flu has a similar or higher fatality rate than H1N1.

If that's true, this new variant, while intellectually interesting, is not really of real concern.

There seems to be a slight difference in that people who aren't in the normal influenza risk groups can also die, but the risk is still very small, and regular influenza still kills more every year than this one has.

But hey, at least the ailing newspaper industry can make some money on riding the hype and fear wave. The only problem is that the usual conspiracy nuts are given some time in the spotlight and this in turn makes a small amount of people more sceptical towards modern medicine, which is just sad.

The 1918 flu went around once, and wasn't a big deal. Then it went around a 2nd time and killed lots of young people with the same "cytokine storm" pneumonia from an excessive immune response.

http://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_garrett_on_lessons_from_the_...

"Death spiral"?? Nice to see we're not over reacting here or anything.

Upon reading the article one learns that the "death spiral" refers to the runaway inflammation called a cytokine storm in individual patients.

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