Word: flu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...accurate reflection of how unpredictable the influenza virus can be. Although flu activity has been waning for the third week in a row, health officials warn that there are still four to five months left in the official influenza season, plenty of time for the virus to make its rounds and find new hosts. "The story of pandemics, and the story of H1N1 in general, is the story of persistent uncertainty where we never quite know what we are going to get or when," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia University...
...severe the current H1N1 pandemic seems depends on what you use as a measuring stick. Compared with previous pandemics, like the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed 20 million people and infected up to 40% of the world's population, or even the far less deadly 1957 and 1968 bouts with a strain of H1N1 influenza similar to the 2009 strain, things don't seem as bad this time around. Fewer people are getting severely ill when infected, and fewer have died or required hospitalization from the flu than in previous pandemics. (See what you need to know about the H1N1...
...spring in two cities - New York and Minneapolis - and determined that 0.048% of people who developed symptoms of H1N1 died, and 1.44% required hospitalization. Based on that data, published in PLoS Medicine, Lipsitch anticipates far fewer deaths from 2009 H1N1 than was initially believed. By the end of the flu season in the spring of 2010, Lipsitch predicts, anywhere from 6,000 to 45,000 people will have died from H1N1 in the U.S., with the number most likely to end up between 10,000 and 15,000. Those estimates are far below the death toll of the 1957 flu...
...H1N1 Vaccine With the world already grappling with a pandemic of 2009 H1N1 influenza, no treatment was more hotly anticipated or more in demand in the U.S. (and the rest of the northern hemisphere) than the new H1N1 vaccine when flu season officially kicked off in the fall. Despite the fact that the vaccine had proved effective in trials with one dose - rather than two, as researchers had originally expected - the vaccine supply from U.S. manufacturers still couldn't keep pace with demand in the first weeks of October, when the first million or so shots rolled off production lines...
Health officials in the U.S. are reporting that the current wave of H1N1 swine flu appears to have peaked. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other groups, new infections are declining in most states, though the virus continues to spread in Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as remote parts of the U.S. Experts also caution that H1N1 might return later this winter. The virus has killed at least 6,700 people worldwide since April...