San Antonio Lightning Newspaper - GITTERLE
I don't know what to think about this swine flu. Is it serious or not?
Here is an email from a doctor that says it will be bad. But if you read the press accounts you see that people report they had flu, but not that severe. Nobody knows how many cases there were in Mexico to go with that 150+ mortality. People with mild flu don't seek help (except now that everybody is freaking out), and there may have been tens of thousands of mild cases for all we know, so the mortality rate could have been low. Flu kills 35,000 people in the US every year anyway.
So is this just a new type of not-terribly-deadly flu that lots of us will get and recover from? Or is this some horrible plague? I am inclined to think it is the former, but not being an MD or an epidemiologist, that is just a layman's sense of things.
2 comments:
This reminds me of a mild earthquake. It's not so much that the earthquake itself is so terrible, it's that you don't know during the earthquake whether it will get worse, and you don't know whether it's a precursor to a stronger quake.
This article from the LATimes is interesting:
"Though scientists have begun to relax about the initial toll, they're considerably less comfortable when taking into account the fall flu season. They remain haunted by the experience of 1918, when the relatively mild first wave of flu was followed several months later by a more aggressive wave.
"The longer the virus survives, the more chances it has to mutate into a deadlier form."
Scientists see this flu strain as relatively mild - Los Angeles Times (1 May 2009)
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-sci-swine-reality30-2009apr30,0,3606923.story?page=2
I posted on an earlier article concerning this flu and I do have a good educational and working knowledge of epidemiology, microbiology and process of disease. Everyone needs to use a little commmon sense with this "outbreak," as with other viruses that move within populations. The fact that the age group which seems to be falling ill to this virus is not the typical infants, young children, elderly, et. The statistics I have seen reported place the age group most affected, (exhibiting the flu, confirmed diagnosis, etc,), as those between the ages of the late teens to early fifties. I believe this is because this age group, or population, tends to be out among other's more, is extremely mobile and is generally in contact with more people as a part of their lifestyles, employment, etc.
Will it mutate and come back stronger? I don't know for sure, but I believe any virus can reconfigure then affect a population. The standard "seasonal flu," does this all the time and flu shots differ every year in response to a new strain.
I think a lot of the press is causing and fostering some irrational fear.
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