Mexican President Felipe Calderon wearing a surgical mask as he talks with nurses at a hospital in Uruapan, Michoacan state.
Credit: AFP
The prospects of a severe global swine flu pandemic appear to be diminishing. Informed reporting can take some of the credit.
When the first reports of swine flu – so described because of its apparent origins in pigs, but since renamed as the less provocative A(H1N1) – appeared in Mexico last month, the prospect of a global pandemic set alarm bells ringing in medical and political circles around the world.
So far our worst fears have failed to materialise. Although 79 people have died – out of more than 9,830 infected in 40 countries – 72 of these were in Mexico. And many parts of the world, including Africa and South Asia, have yet to confirm any cases at all, according to the most recent reports from the World Health Organisation (WHO).
But this doesn't mean we can be complacent. Initial outbreaks of a relatively benign form of flu have often been followed several months later by a much more virulent strain as the virus mutates. This was the case in 1918 when 'Spanish flu' killed perhaps as many as 100 million people worldwide.
And it is widely acknowledged that, if this happened again, people in developing countries could be most at risk. This is partly because closer living conditions help a contagious virus spread rapidly, but also because many countries lack diagnostic facilities, anti-flu treatments and vaccinations.
No swine flu vaccine
Pharmaceutical companies have had to choose between developing and manufacturing seasonal influenza vaccines or swine flu vaccines. Early this week, WHO advised the pharmaceutical industry against switching its production focus onto the new swine flu virus.
"WHO made the recommendation that seasonal influenza vaccine (production) should continue," WHO director-general Margaret Chan told member states at an annual assembly in Geneva, Switzerland. Chan came to international prominence in 2003 as Hong Kong's chief medical officer in charge of a campaign against the SARS virus.
Chan said the industry was still not in a position to make a potential swine flu vaccine. Based on experience gleaned from the 40 countries where outbreaks of swine flu have spread, health experts say the symptoms of A(H1N1) are regarded as no more severe than those of seasonal flu.
Swine Flu: so far, so good
Swine flu is part of evolution in that it should eradicate the infirm, and those liable to further disease transmission, and the resulting refinement of those numbers of individuals should strengthen the human genetic base. There are those lefties, liberals, and conservatives who disagree, because for big business and doctrinal reasons they stupidly and vociferously, and also cunningly, try to propogandise that human evolution is hereby terminated, and they are fulsomely incorrect, and thus they threaten to return humanity to a morbid and stupid state of religious-like inertia, by denying the ongoing and indefinate nature of human evolution, and in its many and varied and extremely subtle processes of selection.
H1N1 has entered every Taiwan School to date.
I'm a teacher in Taiwan and every one of my after school students tell me about how they all have students with H1N1 who were in their classrooms. Death toll today hit 24 people in Taiwan. This H1N1 thing is spreading across Taiwan like the wind.
Unknowns about H1N1:
1. Can a person catch H1N1 + Asian Flu at same time? If so what would be the effects?
2. Will H1N1 become a new yearly flu thing or can a person that catches it, catch it again in a few months?
3. Will H1N1 in the first part of a N Korean experiment, then what would be a catalyst to it?
Scott C. Waring
Author of West's Time Machine & George's Pond
Soon to release Dragons of Asgard & UFO Sightings