Word: flu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bali has always been a separate part of Indonesia. A Hindu province inside the biggest Muslim country in the world, a jet-setting resort inside a poor, rural nation - and a zone free of human cases of avian influenza in the nation that has recorded the most bird flu infections in the world. But Bali is bird flu free no longer. Today the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed the death of a young Balinese woman from H5N1 avian flu, the second case on the island in less than a month. Although Indonesian and WHO officials were quick to note that...
...also a reminder that Indonesia - a vast nation of 18,000 islands and 235 million people - is quietly losing its battle against bird flu. Three years after the disease was first detected among the nation's poultry, the virus has spread to virtually every province in Indonesia. So far, 26 Indonesians have died of the disease this year alone. The deaths have become so common that they now rarely catch the world's attention - but the Bali cases are different, especially for the Indonesian government. Tourist arrivals to Bali's beaches are just now recovering from a pair of deadly...
...Indonesian government was worried enough about the Bali cases to do something it hasn't done in months: share H5N1 virus samples with the WHO. Under new international health regulations that went into effect in June, all countries are supposed to share virus samples of dangerous diseases like bird flu with the WHO, to help international scientists track contagion - and in the case of the flu, formulate possible vaccines. Since the end of last year, however, Indonesia has refused to share samples, claiming that international drug companies were using Indonesian H5N1 strains to produce vaccines, which they would then sell...
...future, researchers in Michigan went straight to the past. Led by Dr. Howard Markel, director of the University of Michigan Medical School's Center for the History of Medicine, a team of public-health experts evaluated the U.S. response to the world's last great pandemic - the Spanish flu in 1918. The new report, published in the Aug. 8 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed the public-health measures taken by 43 U.S. cities, all with populations greater than 100,000, during the six months between Sept. 1918 and Feb. 1919. Markel found that cities that...
That's good news, considering that the U.S. has purchased only 26 million doses of the newly licensed H5N1 flu vaccines, enough to cover 13 million people in the event of a pandemic -but there's no guarantee that H5N1 will even be the bug in question. In 1918 the Spanish flu infected 20% of the world's population and killed 40 million people (a mortality rate of 2.5%), and 550,000 of those deaths were in the U.S. What the new study illuminates is the small print behind that big number: some cities got hit much harder than others...