Pigs get flu from humans
Courtesy teresia
Canadian human infects pigs with "swine flu"
"A worker at (a Canadian) farm had traveled to Mexico, fallen ill there and unknowingly brought the disease back to Canada last month. The worker has recovered.
About 10 percent of the 2,200 pigs on the farm got sick. According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, all recovered without treatment in five days.
The entire herd remains under quarantine as a precaution. New York Times"
Learn more
For additional information read this Wall Street Journal post titled,
Pigs in Canada Contract Flu Virus
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Department of Health and Human Services
Courtesy Department of Health and Human Services
H1N1 Flu information
If you want valid information about Influenza A(H1N1), You should first check out the official disease control websites.
Here are some of the official web pages of our national and world leadership for information about fighting disease.
Also embeded is a webcast where public questions about the 2009 flu pandemic are answered by Acting Director of CDC, Dr. Besser.
Use the links below for official information about Influenza A(H1N1)
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- PandemicFlu.gov
- CDC H1N1 flu information
- H1N1 Flu questions & answers
- World Health Organization info
President Obama's flu message
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Watch a webcast answering questions about the 2009 flu pandemic
Is this the face of a pandemic threat?
Courtesy The Pug FatherNo need to put down your pork chops, as health officials are quick to remind us: you can't get swine flu from eating products made from pigs. In fact, health officials have yet to find a pig with this particular strain of the virus. According to the CDC, the virus that's been making headlines this week contains not only pig, but also human and bird flu DNA. Viruses are complicated and mutate as they go from one host to the next, so it's difficult to tell just where novel strains originate. All of this has left many people to question whether it's appropriate to call the virus "swine flu" at all?
Pork producers say: leave pigs out of this!
They're afraid that the name "swine flu" will cause demand for their products to plummet, and have asked government officials and the news media to call the virus by it's scientific name, H1N1, which refers to the serotype of the virus - its particular chemical make-up. It's a rational fear on their part. Some countries have already banned meat and pork products from Mexico and parts of the US due to fear over the spread of the disease.
What do you think? Would a flu by any other name...smell like meat? When it comes to novel viruses like this one, what's in a name?
Pandemic prevention in Mexico City
Courtesy Chupacabras
No mass at Cathedral of Mexico City Sunday
In addition to churches, Mexico closed schools, museums, libraries and theaters, hoping to contain the outbreak of a swine flu variety that is killing people. Officials say as many as 81 people have died and more than 1,300 others are sickened from a new type of flu.
The virus contains genetic pieces from four different flu viruses; North American swine influenza, North American avian influenza, human influenza A N1H1, and swine influenza viruses found in Asia and Europe.
Swine flu symptoms
Symptoms of the flu-like illness include a fever of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees Celsius), body aches, coughing, a sore throat, respiratory congestion and, in some cases, vomiting and diarrhea. Click this link for more key facts about swine influenza (swine flu).
Global swine flu alert
China, Russia and Taiwan plan to put anyone with symptoms of the deadly virus under quarantine. Ten students from New Zealand who took a school trip to Mexico "likely" caught this swine flu. Four possible cases of swine flu are currently under investigation in France. More than 100 students at the St. Francis Preparatory School, in Queens, New York recently began suffering a fever, sore throat and aches and pains. Some of them had recently been in Mexico.
"The United States government is working with the World Health Organization and other international partners to assure early detection and warning and to respond as rapidly as possible to this threat," Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the CDC, said during a Friday afternoon press briefing.
How to track illnesses globally
There are several useful online resources that track health information and disease outbreaks.
- The World Health Organization (WHO) has an Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response (EPR) webpage.
As of 26 April 2009, the United States Government has reported 20 laboratory confirmed human cases of swine influenza A/H1N1 (8 in New York, 7 in California, 2 in Texas, 2 in Kansas and 1 in Ohio).
- HealthMap is a website that aggregates news feeds from the WHO, Google News, ProMED, and elsewhere to map out all of the disease outbreaks. (Click the box in front of influenza under "Diseases, last 30 days" to see just flu cases.)
What is a pandemic?
The WHO's pandemic alert level is currently up to phase 3. The organization said the level could be raised to phase 4 if the virus shows sustained ability to pass from human to human. Phase 5 would be reached if the virus is found in at least two countries in the same region.
"The declaration of phase 5 is a strong signal that a pandemic is imminent and that the time to finalize the organization, communication, and implementation of the planned mitigation measures is short," WHO said. Associated Press
Phase 6 would indicate a full-scale global pandemic.
Sources:
Bird flu rears its head again in China
Bird flu death in China
Courtesy broterham A two year old girl in northern China has tested positive for bird flu. Early this month, January 5, a 19-year-old Beijing woman died of bird flu after handling poultry. She had purchased ducks at a market in Hebei Province, which neighbors Beijing. Although she had close contact with 116 people, no one around her has fallen ill.
Pandemic possibilities worry officials
Human-to-human transmission of avian flu is rare, but officials worry the virus could mutate and become a deadly pandemic. H5N1 has led to 248 deaths worldwide since 2003, including 21 in China.
Source articles:
Click this link to read all CNN articles about bird flu
Blood from bird flu survivors successfully treats H5N1 virus in mice.
Treatment for H5N1The antibodies worked well when administered three days after the mice were infected, with all 20 mice in the treatment groups surviving, compared with none out of five in the control group. Antibody-producing white blood cells, called memory B cells, were separated from the blood of four Vietnamese who had recovered from H5N1 influenza (bird flu). In Switzerland, Dr. Lanzavecchia treated them with a process he developed so that they rapidly and continuously produced large amounts of antibody.
Next, researchers in Dr. Subbarao's lab screened 11,000 antibody-containing samples provided by the Swiss team and found a handful able to neutralize H5N1 influenza virus. Based on these results, Dr. Lanzavecchia purified the B cells and ultimately created four monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that secrete H5N1-specific neutralizing antibodies." Science Daily
Human antibodies used in flu pandemic of 1918.
Using blood products from influenza survivors is an old idea, the researchers note. During the flu pandemic of 1918-19, for example, physicians took serum from recovered flu patients and gave it to new victims. A recent study suggests it halved the death rate, from 37% to 16%.
Antibodies are costlier and harder to mass produce.
The new antibody treatment could be used together with antivirals:
“What we are trying to do is add another arrow to the quiver of options for treating patients with H5N1 infection," says Cameron Simmons, who led the study. New Scientist
Because the survival rate was excellent even when treatment was delayed for three days, this antibody treatment would work well in treating the few people who catch the disease directly from birds, and for localized outbreaks. For large scale prevention against bird flu, antiviral drugs such as Tamiflu are the still the best defense.
Research article in PLoS Medicine: Prophylactic and Therapeutic Efficacy of Human Monoclonal Antibodies against H5N1 Influenza.
The Pandemic: Photo Courtesy of Malingering
No, its not bird flu, but there is a pandemic rapidly spreading through the world and contributing to a variety of diseases.
What is it?
Obesity.
"This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world,” Professor Paul Zimmet declared at the opening speech of the International Congress on Obesity. He also said, "it's as big a threat as global warming and bird flu.”
Obesity puts people at a higher risk for getting diabetes, heart problems, high blood pressure, stroke and some forms of cancer.
How bad is this pandemic?
There are about 6.5 billion people in the world. There are one billion overweight people in the world. So that means that 15 percent of the world population is affected by or will potentially be affected by the diseases related to being overweight. That’s a lot. Of the one billion overweight people, about 300 million are diagnosed as obese. But that is still a significant percentage of the world population (about five percent).
Interestingly enough, there are actually more overweight people in the world than undernourished. At least one billion people are overweight, whereas about 600 million people are undernourished.
Those statistics were for the whole world. But in certain countries, particularly Australia, England and the United States, the number of overweight people is much higher. In Australia, 25 percent of children, 50 percent of adult women, and 67 percent of men are overweight. The exact statistics for the U.S. were not given at the Australian International Congress on Obesity, but they were mentioned to be even higher than Australia’s percentages.
Not only is obesity a health problem, but it is an economic problem. Especially in the countries of Australia, England and the U.S., where billions of dollars are spent each year on treating health problems directly connected to being overweight. In fact, in the U.S., the states with the highest obesity levels also have the highest poverty rates.
How can we stop it?
According to the Trust for America's Health advocacy group, at least $5.6 billion could be saved when it comes to treating heart disease if just one-tenth of Americans began a regular walking program.
It seems like it would be pretty easy to stop this pandemic if we quit being so lazy.
Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in collaboration with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and the Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory, have successfully reconstructed the 1918 influenza (flu) virus, the cause of one of the most deadly epidemics in history. The 1918 influenza virus infected nearly one third of the world's population and killed nearly 50 million people. In the process of reconstructing the virus scientists learned that the virus originated as a bird flu that jumped directly to humans. The reconstruction of the 1918 virus will help scientists prepare for the next influenza pandemic.
H5N1 Virus: Colorized transmission electron micrograph of Avian influenza A H5N1 viruses (seen in gold). Image courtesy CDC/C. Goldsmith, J. Katz, and S. Zaki.
The virus was reconstructed using lung tissue recovered from two soldiers and an Alaskan woman who died during the 1918 pandemic. The tissue from the soldier's lungs had been saved in an Army pathology warehouse, and the tissue from the Alaskan woman's lungs was preserved as she was buried in permafrost.
Influenza pandemics occur when a new strain of the virus emerges to which people have little or no immunity. The research, published in recent issues of Science and Nature, allows researchers to learn what made the 1918 pandemic so much more deadly than other pandemics that came after 1918 (the1957 Asian flu and the 1968 Hong Kong Flu).
There is concern that the current avian flu viruses, H5N1, could make a similar jump from birds to humans as the 1918 virus. Nearly all the people who have been infected with H5N1 contracted the virus directly from birds.
There was no danger to the public from the recreation of the 1918 virus as not only was the research conducted in a level 3 biosafety lab, but since most flu viruses today are "descendants" of the 1918 flu, people today have some immunity to that strain. There is no such immunity to the H5N1 virus in people now, which is what worries many researchers and physicians.
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