Rosa Lichtenstein
1st May 2009, 13:08
Can mod please change the title to "The truth about 'swine flu'"?...thanks!
From Socialist Worker:
What’s behind killer swine flu?
The headlines have been apocalyptic – a new outbreak of swine flu is in danger of engulfing the world.
There are indeed reasons for concern. Normal seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many one million people a year globally. Even a modest increase in virulence, especially if combined with high incidence, could cause huge problems across the world.
The most lethal flu outbreak to date was in 1918-19. It killed more than 2 percent of humanity (40 to 50 million people) in a single winter.
The development of a swine flu that can be passed between humans was predictable. Influenza constantly changes and mutates to create new strains. There have already been several incidents of flu strains jumping species and unleashing a virulent pandemic.
Both the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs.
Concentrated poverty is one of the most important issues in what happens to a flu outbreak – how it is spread and who it hits.
Twenty million or more of the deaths in the 1918-19 flu outbreak were in poorest parts of India.
The toll of HIV/AIDS in the Global South and the two million children annually killed by malaria should be a warning that capitalism is willing to let poor people die, even of curable diseases.
The World Health Organisation, backed by Western leaders, has argued that pandemics can be contained by the rapid responses of medical bureaucracies. The idea is that the strain is identified and then dealt with by local populations getting enough anti-viral drugs.
Vaccination
Rather than working together to produce a vaccination for each new flu strain, which is unprofitable for the pharmaceutical companies because many new flu strains don’t reach pandemic level, governments tend to rely on generic anti-virals such as Tamiflu.
But frequently a moderate flu epidemic outstrips the vaccine prepared for it even in the richest countries. The British government says it only has enough anti-virals for half the population.
Repeated assaults on public sector health care as part of the neoliberal agenda have made it harder to deal with the problem.
A key factor behind new diseases such as the swine flu threat is the growing concentration of animal production without appropriate regulation or biological safeguards.
Food production is driven by a handful of giant global corporations. This means large numbers of livestock crammed together to maximise profits.
Two thirds of poultry production in Britain already takes place in flocks of over 100,000 birds.
In the US today 65 million pigs are concentrated in just 65,000 facilities, compared to 53 million pigs on more than one million farms in 1965.
In such huge units animals are more prone to disease, which can rapidly spread and evolve into more deadly forms.
In order to boost growth and guard against illnesses, the corporations pump animals full of antibiotics, including ones used to treat human diseases.
Cuts in the regulation and monitoring of the meat industry also create huge dangers.
Only last week Alistair Darling announced plans in the budget to save £44 million by cutting “animal disease surveillance through a more risk-based approach to monitoring and enforcement and by sharing costs with industry”.
Corporate domination of food, healthcare and pharmaceuticals all contribute to the threat of a flu pandemic – and so do the acts of governments that allow these corporations to dominate world politics.
As the US author Mike Davies puts it, “Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political will to monitor livestock diseases, but the situation is hardly better north of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals.”
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=17777
From the Guardian:
Swine flu? A panic stoked in order to posture and spend
Despite the hysteria the risk to Britons' health is tiny - but that news won't sell papers or drugs, or justify the WHO's budget
We have gone demented. Two Britons are or were (not very) ill from flu. "This could really explode," intones a reporter for BBC News. "London warned: it's here," cries the Evening Standard. Fear is said to be spreading "like a Mexican wave". It "could affect" three-quarters of a million Britons. It "could cost" three trillion dollars. The "danger", according to the radio, is that workers who are not ill will be "worried" (perhaps by the reporter) and fail to turn up at power stations and hospitals.
Appropriately panicked, on Monday ministers plunged into their Cobra bunker beneath Whitehall to prepare for the worst. Had Tony Blair been about they would have worn germ warfare suits. British government is barking mad.
What is swine flu? It is flu, a mutation of the H1N1 virus of the sort that often occurs. It is not a pandemic, despite the media prefix, not yet. The BBC calls it a "potentially terrible virus", but any viral infection is potentially terrible. Flu makes you feel ill. You should take medicine and rest. You will then get well again, unless you are very unlucky or have some complicating condition. It is best to avoid close contact with other people, as applies to a common cold.
In Mexico, 2,000 people have been diagnosed as suffering swine flu. Some 150 of them have died, though there is said to be no pathological indication of all these deaths being linked to the new flu strain. People die all the time after catching flu, especially if not medicated.
Nobody anywhere else in the world has died from this infection and only a handful have the new strain confirmed, most in America and almost all after returning from Mexico. A couple from Airdrie who caught the flu on holiday in Cancun are getting better. That tends to happen to people who get flu, however much it may disappoint editors.
We appear to have lost all ability to judge risk. The cause may lie in the national curriculum, the decline of "news" or the rise of blogs and concomitant, unmediated hysteria, but people seem helpless in navigating the gulf that separates public information from their daily round. They cannot set a statistic in context. They cannot relate bad news from Mexico to the risk that inevitably surrounds their lives. The risk of catching swine flu must be millions to one.
Health scares are like terrorist ones. Someone somewhere has an interest in it. We depend on others with specialist knowledge to advise and warn us and assume they offer advice on a dispassionate basis, using their expertise to assess danger and communicating it in measured English. Words such as possibly, potentially, could or might should be avoided. They are unspecific qualifiers and open to exaggeration.
The World Health Organisation, always eager to push itself into the spotlight, loves to talk of the world being "ready" for a flu pandemic, apparently on the grounds that none has occurred for some time. There is no obvious justification for this scaremongering. I suppose the world is "ready" for another atomic explosion or another 9/11.
Professional expertise is now overwhelmed by professional log-rolling. Risk aversion has trounced risk judgment. An obligation on public officials not to scare people or lead them to needless expense is overridden by the yearning for a higher budget or more profit. Health scares enable media-hungry doctors, public health officials and drugs companies to benefit by manipulating fright.
On Monday the EU health commissioner, Androulla Vassiliou, advised travellers not to go to north or central America "unless it's very urgent". The British Foreign Office warned against "all but essential" travel to Mexico because of the danger of catching flu. This was outrageous. It would make more sense to proffer such a warning against the American crime rate. Yet such health-and-safety hysteria wiped millions from travel company shares.
During the BSE scare of 1995-7, grown men with medical degrees predicted doom, terrifying ministers into mad politician disease. The scientists' hysteria, that BSE "has the potential to infect up to 10 million Britons", led to tens of thousands of cattle being fed into power stations and £5bn spent on farmers' compensation. A year later, the scientists tried to maintain that BSE "might" spread to sheep because, according to one government scientist, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". The meat industry was wrecked and an absurd ongoing cost was imposed on stock farmers with the closure and concentration of abattoirs.
This science-based insanity was repeated during the Sars outbreak of 2003, asserted by Dr Patrick Dixon, formerly of the London Business School, to have "a 25% chance of killing tens of millions". The press duly headlined a plague "worse than Aids". Not one Briton died.
The same lunacy occurred in 2006 with avian flu, erupting after a scientist named John Oxford declared that "it will be the first pandemic of the 21st century". The WHO issued a statement that "one in four Britons could die".
Epidemiologists love the word "could" because it can always assure them of a headline. During the avian flu mania, Canada geese were treated like Goering's bombers. RSPB workers were issued with protective headgear.The media went berserk, with interviewers asking why the government did not close all schools "to prevent up to 50,000 deaths". The Today programme's John Humphrys became frantic when a dead goose flopped down on an isolated Scottish beach and a hapless local official refused to confirm the BBC's hysteria. The bird might pose no threat to Scotland, but how dare he deny London journalists a good panic?
Meanwhile a real pestilence, MRSA and C difficile, was taking hold in hospitals. It was suppressed by the medical profession because it appeared that they themselves might be to blame. These diseases have played a role in thousands of deaths in British hospitals - the former a reported 1,652 and the latter 8,324 in 2007 alone. Like deaths from alcoholism, we have come to regard hospital-induced infection as an accident of life, a hazard to which we have subconsciously adjusted.
MRSA and C difficile are not like swine flu, an opportunity for public figures to scare and posture and spend money. They are diseases for which the government is to blame. They claim no headlines and no Cobra priority. Their sufferers must crawl away and die in silence.
[email protected]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/29/swine-flu-mexico-uk-media1
From a medical site:
INFLUENZA A (H1N1) "SWINE FLU": WORLDWIDE (03)
**********************************************
A ProMED-mail post
<http://www.promedmail.org>
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
<http://www.isid.org>
In this update:
[1] Some questions
[2] New Zealand
[3] Israel
[4] Comment on seasonality
******
[1] Some questions
Date: Tue 28 Apr 2009
From: Roger Morris <[email protected]>
Some questions
--------------
For those of us who are involved in international work on influenza
epidemiology and control and responding to the many media enquiries,
there is a very large information gap in relation to diagnosis and
epidemiology of the Mexican influenza. What is known of the genetic
structure of this virus? It has been called a swine flu, but no
evidence has been put forward to allow this statement to be
evaluated. I have received information that it is a reassortant,
which has genetic components from 4 different sources, but nothing
official has been released on this. Where does it fit
phylogenetically? Is there any genetic variation of significance
among the isolates investigated? Would this help to explain the
difference in severity of disease between Mexico and other countries?
It is also stated that it should be diagnosed by RT-PCR, without
clarifying which PCR. I have received information that the standard
PCR for H1 does not reliably detect this virus. Is this true? What is
an appropriate series of diagnostic steps for samples from suspect
cases? Could we have an authoritative statement on these issues from
one of the laboratories, which has been working with the virus?
--
Professor Roger Morris
Emeritus Professor of Animal Health
Massey University EpiCentre, PN623
Institute of Veterinary, Animal and Biomedical Sciences
Massey University, Palmerston North
New Zealand
<[email protected]>
[The genome sequences of several US isolates are now available at GenBank: see
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/FLU/SwineFlu.html>. - Mod.CP]
******
[2] New Zealand
Date: Tue 28 Apr 2009
Source: Ministry of Health, New Zealand, Media Release [edited]
<http://www.moh.govt.nz/moh.nsf/indexmh/results-of-h1n1-swine-flu-testing-280409>
Results of H1N1 (swine flu) testing
-----------------------------------
Director of Public Health, Dr Mark Jacobs announced tonight [28 Apr
2009] that results from some of the Rangitoto College party who
tested positive to influenza A on Sunday [25 Apr 2009], have also
tested positive for swine flu H1N1.
Results from 3 of the samples were received earlier this evening [28
Apr 2009] from the World Health Organization regional laboratory in
Melbourne and all tested positive for the same strain of swine flu.
Testing continues on a 4th sample.
On the basis of these results, we are assuming that all of the people
in the group who had tested positive for influenza A have swine flu.
As a result we are continuing with the current treatment, which has
been based on this assumption.
We were advised that the lab in Melbourne selected 4 of the best
samples of the very delicate genetic material to analyse. They found
3 positive results and one is still to be confirmed.
Staff from Auckland Regional Public Health are getting in touch with
those affected and informing them of the results. This is expected to
be completed by 10:00 pm tonight [28 Apr 2009]. All 10 are understood
to be recovering at home.
There is no need to change the treatment and follow-up of the
Rangitoto College group. The Tamiflu treatment will continue and they
will remain in home isolation and should complete 72 hours of Tamiflu
before they can return to normal activities.
--
Communicated by
Dr Patricia Priest
Senior Lecturer, Epidemiology
Department of Preventive and Social Medicine
University of Otago
Dunedin
New Zealand
<[email protected]>
[The HealthMap/ProMED-mail interactive map of New Zealand is available at
<http://healthmap.org/r/00aG>. - CopyEd.MJ]
******
[3] Israel
Date: Tue 28 Apr 2009
Source: Haaretz News Service [edited]
<http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1081774.html>
Israel confirms 1st case of swine flu, raises alert level to 4
--------------------------------------------------------------
Israel confirmed its 1st case of swine flu on Tuesday [28 Apr 2009],
Israel Radio reported, as the Health Ministry raised its level of
alert to 4 out of 6. A 26-year-old man who recently returned from
Mexico was diagnosed with the virus, after 2 days of quarantine in a
Netanya hospital pending results of his health tests. After the
diagnosis, he was listed in good condition at the hospital.
World health officials, racing to extinguish a new flu strain that is
jumping borders, raised a global alert to an unprecedented level as
the outbreak claimed more lives in Mexico. The US prepared for the
worst even as president Barack Obama tried to reassure Americans.
With the swine flu having already spread to at least 4 other
countries, authorities around the globe are like firefighters
battling a blaze without knowing how far it extends. At this time,
containment is not a feasible option, said Keiji Fukuda, assistant
director-general of the World Health Organization, which raised its
alert level on Monday [27 Apr 2009].
Another Israeli man has also been quarantined until further notice in
hospitals in a Kfar Sava, after he too returned from Mexico with
fu-like symptoms. The Health Ministry said Monday [27 Apr 2009] that
it had embraced the recommendation of the European Commission to
postpone nonessential travel to Mexico and recommends that travelers
be alert to reports regarding other countries. Health Ministry
officials said Monday they were not issuing any special instructions
to the public for now, including individuals returning from Mexico.
The ministry did recommend that such travelers seek medical
assistance if they develop flu-like symptoms within 7 days after
their return. These individuals would be quarantined at local
hospitals until their condition is determined.
[Byline: Ran Reznick, Yair Ettinger, Zohar Blumenkrantz]
--
Communicated by:
ProMED-mail
<[email protected]>
The HealthMap/ProMED-mail interactive map of Israel is available at
<http://healthmap.org/r/00aH>. - CopyEd.MJ]
******
[4] Comment on seasonality
Date: Mon 27 Apr 2009
From: EA Gould <[email protected]>
Swine influenza and the UK
--------------------------
I haven't been able to read every single ProMED-mail report covering
the new "swine" influenza outbreak but it is possible that the
reports have missed an important point concerning the UK and the rest
of Northern Europe.
I apologise if you or someone have already pointed it out, but for
the time being at least, we should have a breathing space in the
sense that influenza virus epidemics don't normally occur in Northern
Europe during the late spring and summer period.
So it would have to be totally outside precedent if this virus caused
significant infections at this time of the year in the UK.
Professor EA Gould
CEH Oxford
Mansfield Road
Oxford OX1 3SR
United Kingdom
<[email protected]>
http://www.promedmail.org/pls/otn/f?p=2400:1001:2333977618794706::NO::F2400_P1001_BA CK_PAGE,F2400_P1001_PUB_MAIL_ID:1000,77243
Still, it distracts attention from the global crisis by scaring us all witless...
From Socialist Worker:
What’s behind killer swine flu?
The headlines have been apocalyptic – a new outbreak of swine flu is in danger of engulfing the world.
There are indeed reasons for concern. Normal seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many one million people a year globally. Even a modest increase in virulence, especially if combined with high incidence, could cause huge problems across the world.
The most lethal flu outbreak to date was in 1918-19. It killed more than 2 percent of humanity (40 to 50 million people) in a single winter.
The development of a swine flu that can be passed between humans was predictable. Influenza constantly changes and mutates to create new strains. There have already been several incidents of flu strains jumping species and unleashing a virulent pandemic.
Both the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs.
Concentrated poverty is one of the most important issues in what happens to a flu outbreak – how it is spread and who it hits.
Twenty million or more of the deaths in the 1918-19 flu outbreak were in poorest parts of India.
The toll of HIV/AIDS in the Global South and the two million children annually killed by malaria should be a warning that capitalism is willing to let poor people die, even of curable diseases.
The World Health Organisation, backed by Western leaders, has argued that pandemics can be contained by the rapid responses of medical bureaucracies. The idea is that the strain is identified and then dealt with by local populations getting enough anti-viral drugs.
Vaccination
Rather than working together to produce a vaccination for each new flu strain, which is unprofitable for the pharmaceutical companies because many new flu strains don’t reach pandemic level, governments tend to rely on generic anti-virals such as Tamiflu.
But frequently a moderate flu epidemic outstrips the vaccine prepared for it even in the richest countries. The British government says it only has enough anti-virals for half the population.
Repeated assaults on public sector health care as part of the neoliberal agenda have made it harder to deal with the problem.
A key factor behind new diseases such as the swine flu threat is the growing concentration of animal production without appropriate regulation or biological safeguards.
Food production is driven by a handful of giant global corporations. This means large numbers of livestock crammed together to maximise profits.
Two thirds of poultry production in Britain already takes place in flocks of over 100,000 birds.
In the US today 65 million pigs are concentrated in just 65,000 facilities, compared to 53 million pigs on more than one million farms in 1965.
In such huge units animals are more prone to disease, which can rapidly spread and evolve into more deadly forms.
In order to boost growth and guard against illnesses, the corporations pump animals full of antibiotics, including ones used to treat human diseases.
Cuts in the regulation and monitoring of the meat industry also create huge dangers.
Only last week Alistair Darling announced plans in the budget to save £44 million by cutting “animal disease surveillance through a more risk-based approach to monitoring and enforcement and by sharing costs with industry”.
Corporate domination of food, healthcare and pharmaceuticals all contribute to the threat of a flu pandemic – and so do the acts of governments that allow these corporations to dominate world politics.
As the US author Mike Davies puts it, “Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political will to monitor livestock diseases, but the situation is hardly better north of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals.”
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=17777
From the Guardian:
Swine flu? A panic stoked in order to posture and spend
Despite the hysteria the risk to Britons' health is tiny - but that news won't sell papers or drugs, or justify the WHO's budget
We have gone demented. Two Britons are or were (not very) ill from flu. "This could really explode," intones a reporter for BBC News. "London warned: it's here," cries the Evening Standard. Fear is said to be spreading "like a Mexican wave". It "could affect" three-quarters of a million Britons. It "could cost" three trillion dollars. The "danger", according to the radio, is that workers who are not ill will be "worried" (perhaps by the reporter) and fail to turn up at power stations and hospitals.
Appropriately panicked, on Monday ministers plunged into their Cobra bunker beneath Whitehall to prepare for the worst. Had Tony Blair been about they would have worn germ warfare suits. British government is barking mad.
What is swine flu? It is flu, a mutation of the H1N1 virus of the sort that often occurs. It is not a pandemic, despite the media prefix, not yet. The BBC calls it a "potentially terrible virus", but any viral infection is potentially terrible. Flu makes you feel ill. You should take medicine and rest. You will then get well again, unless you are very unlucky or have some complicating condition. It is best to avoid close contact with other people, as applies to a common cold.
In Mexico, 2,000 people have been diagnosed as suffering swine flu. Some 150 of them have died, though there is said to be no pathological indication of all these deaths being linked to the new flu strain. People die all the time after catching flu, especially if not medicated.
Nobody anywhere else in the world has died from this infection and only a handful have the new strain confirmed, most in America and almost all after returning from Mexico. A couple from Airdrie who caught the flu on holiday in Cancun are getting better. That tends to happen to people who get flu, however much it may disappoint editors.
We appear to have lost all ability to judge risk. The cause may lie in the national curriculum, the decline of "news" or the rise of blogs and concomitant, unmediated hysteria, but people seem helpless in navigating the gulf that separates public information from their daily round. They cannot set a statistic in context. They cannot relate bad news from Mexico to the risk that inevitably surrounds their lives. The risk of catching swine flu must be millions to one.
Health scares are like terrorist ones. Someone somewhere has an interest in it. We depend on others with specialist knowledge to advise and warn us and assume they offer advice on a dispassionate basis, using their expertise to assess danger and communicating it in measured English. Words such as possibly, potentially, could or might should be avoided. They are unspecific qualifiers and open to exaggeration.
The World Health Organisation, always eager to push itself into the spotlight, loves to talk of the world being "ready" for a flu pandemic, apparently on the grounds that none has occurred for some time. There is no obvious justification for this scaremongering. I suppose the world is "ready" for another atomic explosion or another 9/11.
Professional expertise is now overwhelmed by professional log-rolling. Risk aversion has trounced risk judgment. An obligation on public officials not to scare people or lead them to needless expense is overridden by the yearning for a higher budget or more profit. Health scares enable media-hungry doctors, public health officials and drugs companies to benefit by manipulating fright.
On Monday the EU health commissioner, Androulla Vassiliou, advised travellers not to go to north or central America "unless it's very urgent". The British Foreign Office warned against "all but essential" travel to Mexico because of the danger of catching flu. This was outrageous. It would make more sense to proffer such a warning against the American crime rate. Yet such health-and-safety hysteria wiped millions from travel company shares.
During the BSE scare of 1995-7, grown men with medical degrees predicted doom, terrifying ministers into mad politician disease. The scientists' hysteria, that BSE "has the potential to infect up to 10 million Britons", led to tens of thousands of cattle being fed into power stations and £5bn spent on farmers' compensation. A year later, the scientists tried to maintain that BSE "might" spread to sheep because, according to one government scientist, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". The meat industry was wrecked and an absurd ongoing cost was imposed on stock farmers with the closure and concentration of abattoirs.
This science-based insanity was repeated during the Sars outbreak of 2003, asserted by Dr Patrick Dixon, formerly of the London Business School, to have "a 25% chance of killing tens of millions". The press duly headlined a plague "worse than Aids". Not one Briton died.
The same lunacy occurred in 2006 with avian flu, erupting after a scientist named John Oxford declared that "it will be the first pandemic of the 21st century". The WHO issued a statement that "one in four Britons could die".
Epidemiologists love the word "could" because it can always assure them of a headline. During the avian flu mania, Canada geese were treated like Goering's bombers. RSPB workers were issued with protective headgear.The media went berserk, with interviewers asking why the government did not close all schools "to prevent up to 50,000 deaths". The Today programme's John Humphrys became frantic when a dead goose flopped down on an isolated Scottish beach and a hapless local official refused to confirm the BBC's hysteria. The bird might pose no threat to Scotland, but how dare he deny London journalists a good panic?
Meanwhile a real pestilence, MRSA and C difficile, was taking hold in hospitals. It was suppressed by the medical profession because it appeared that they themselves might be to blame. These diseases have played a role in thousands of deaths in British hospitals - the former a reported 1,652 and the latter 8,324 in 2007 alone. Like deaths from alcoholism, we have come to regard hospital-induced infection as an accident of life, a hazard to which we have subconsciously adjusted.
MRSA and C difficile are not like swine flu, an opportunity for public figures to scare and posture and spend money. They are diseases for which the government is to blame. They claim no headlines and no Cobra priority. Their sufferers must crawl away and die in silence.
[email protected]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/29/swine-flu-mexico-uk-media1
From a medical site:
INFLUENZA A (H1N1) "SWINE FLU": WORLDWIDE (03)
**********************************************
A ProMED-mail post
<http://www.promedmail.org>
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
<http://www.isid.org>
In this update:
[1] Some questions
[2] New Zealand
[3] Israel
[4] Comment on seasonality
******
[1] Some questions
Date: Tue 28 Apr 2009
From: Roger Morris <[email protected]>
Some questions
--------------
For those of us who are involved in international work on influenza
epidemiology and control and responding to the many media enquiries,
there is a very large information gap in relation to diagnosis and
epidemiology of the Mexican influenza. What is known of the genetic
structure of this virus? It has been called a swine flu, but no
evidence has been put forward to allow this statement to be
evaluated. I have received information that it is a reassortant,
which has genetic components from 4 different sources, but nothing
official has been released on this. Where does it fit
phylogenetically? Is there any genetic variation of significance
among the isolates investigated? Would this help to explain the
difference in severity of disease between Mexico and other countries?
It is also stated that it should be diagnosed by RT-PCR, without
clarifying which PCR. I have received information that the standard
PCR for H1 does not reliably detect this virus. Is this true? What is
an appropriate series of diagnostic steps for samples from suspect
cases? Could we have an authoritative statement on these issues from
one of the laboratories, which has been working with the virus?
--
Professor Roger Morris
Emeritus Professor of Animal Health
Massey University EpiCentre, PN623
Institute of Veterinary, Animal and Biomedical Sciences
Massey University, Palmerston North
New Zealand
<[email protected]>
[The genome sequences of several US isolates are now available at GenBank: see
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/FLU/SwineFlu.html>. - Mod.CP]
******
[2] New Zealand
Date: Tue 28 Apr 2009
Source: Ministry of Health, New Zealand, Media Release [edited]
<http://www.moh.govt.nz/moh.nsf/indexmh/results-of-h1n1-swine-flu-testing-280409>
Results of H1N1 (swine flu) testing
-----------------------------------
Director of Public Health, Dr Mark Jacobs announced tonight [28 Apr
2009] that results from some of the Rangitoto College party who
tested positive to influenza A on Sunday [25 Apr 2009], have also
tested positive for swine flu H1N1.
Results from 3 of the samples were received earlier this evening [28
Apr 2009] from the World Health Organization regional laboratory in
Melbourne and all tested positive for the same strain of swine flu.
Testing continues on a 4th sample.
On the basis of these results, we are assuming that all of the people
in the group who had tested positive for influenza A have swine flu.
As a result we are continuing with the current treatment, which has
been based on this assumption.
We were advised that the lab in Melbourne selected 4 of the best
samples of the very delicate genetic material to analyse. They found
3 positive results and one is still to be confirmed.
Staff from Auckland Regional Public Health are getting in touch with
those affected and informing them of the results. This is expected to
be completed by 10:00 pm tonight [28 Apr 2009]. All 10 are understood
to be recovering at home.
There is no need to change the treatment and follow-up of the
Rangitoto College group. The Tamiflu treatment will continue and they
will remain in home isolation and should complete 72 hours of Tamiflu
before they can return to normal activities.
--
Communicated by
Dr Patricia Priest
Senior Lecturer, Epidemiology
Department of Preventive and Social Medicine
University of Otago
Dunedin
New Zealand
<[email protected]>
[The HealthMap/ProMED-mail interactive map of New Zealand is available at
<http://healthmap.org/r/00aG>. - CopyEd.MJ]
******
[3] Israel
Date: Tue 28 Apr 2009
Source: Haaretz News Service [edited]
<http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1081774.html>
Israel confirms 1st case of swine flu, raises alert level to 4
--------------------------------------------------------------
Israel confirmed its 1st case of swine flu on Tuesday [28 Apr 2009],
Israel Radio reported, as the Health Ministry raised its level of
alert to 4 out of 6. A 26-year-old man who recently returned from
Mexico was diagnosed with the virus, after 2 days of quarantine in a
Netanya hospital pending results of his health tests. After the
diagnosis, he was listed in good condition at the hospital.
World health officials, racing to extinguish a new flu strain that is
jumping borders, raised a global alert to an unprecedented level as
the outbreak claimed more lives in Mexico. The US prepared for the
worst even as president Barack Obama tried to reassure Americans.
With the swine flu having already spread to at least 4 other
countries, authorities around the globe are like firefighters
battling a blaze without knowing how far it extends. At this time,
containment is not a feasible option, said Keiji Fukuda, assistant
director-general of the World Health Organization, which raised its
alert level on Monday [27 Apr 2009].
Another Israeli man has also been quarantined until further notice in
hospitals in a Kfar Sava, after he too returned from Mexico with
fu-like symptoms. The Health Ministry said Monday [27 Apr 2009] that
it had embraced the recommendation of the European Commission to
postpone nonessential travel to Mexico and recommends that travelers
be alert to reports regarding other countries. Health Ministry
officials said Monday they were not issuing any special instructions
to the public for now, including individuals returning from Mexico.
The ministry did recommend that such travelers seek medical
assistance if they develop flu-like symptoms within 7 days after
their return. These individuals would be quarantined at local
hospitals until their condition is determined.
[Byline: Ran Reznick, Yair Ettinger, Zohar Blumenkrantz]
--
Communicated by:
ProMED-mail
<[email protected]>
The HealthMap/ProMED-mail interactive map of Israel is available at
<http://healthmap.org/r/00aH>. - CopyEd.MJ]
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[4] Comment on seasonality
Date: Mon 27 Apr 2009
From: EA Gould <[email protected]>
Swine influenza and the UK
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I haven't been able to read every single ProMED-mail report covering
the new "swine" influenza outbreak but it is possible that the
reports have missed an important point concerning the UK and the rest
of Northern Europe.
I apologise if you or someone have already pointed it out, but for
the time being at least, we should have a breathing space in the
sense that influenza virus epidemics don't normally occur in Northern
Europe during the late spring and summer period.
So it would have to be totally outside precedent if this virus caused
significant infections at this time of the year in the UK.
Professor EA Gould
CEH Oxford
Mansfield Road
Oxford OX1 3SR
United Kingdom
<[email protected]>
http://www.promedmail.org/pls/otn/f?p=2400:1001:2333977618794706::NO::F2400_P1001_BA CK_PAGE,F2400_P1001_PUB_MAIL_ID:1000,77243
Still, it distracts attention from the global crisis by scaring us all witless...