Word: h1n1
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...pandemic flu virus that is barnstorming its way across the globe. Camp Modin was not alone; so far this summer, at least 80 camps in 40 American states, including a full quarter of Maine's residential summer camps, have reportedly been hit by the bug known worldwide as H1N1. Across the Atlantic, Britain's National Health Service spent most of July recording 100,000 new cases a week. Health officials in both countries were struck by a trend they regard as unusual and troubling: a flu outbreak in the middle of summer...
...slide flashed the human toll of previous epidemic flus: more than 600,000 Americans died in the 1918 pandemic; 70,000 "excess" deaths resulted from the Asian flu in 1957; and there were 34,000 deaths after the Hong Kong flu hit in 1968. Next to the 2009-10 H1N1 pandemic, the screens showed nothing but a series of question marks. The punctuation was designed to make a larger point. As a senior official in charge of responding to the crisis later told TIME, "You are going to see a spike in deaths." (See pictures of the swine...
...knows for sure what that spike will look like or how it will compare with the 250,000-500,000 people who die around the world each year from seasonal flu. But ever since the first case of H1N1 flu was reported in Mexico last March, health officials from Washington to Beijing have been girding for a difficult fall and winter. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that anywhere from 15% to 45% of the world's population - 1 billion to 3 billion people - will catch the illness. "We know that influenza usually takes off in the winter months," says...
...humans that his team can work with it only in biosecurity Level 4 laboratories, the highest level of biological containment available. So far, H5N1 is passed to humans only from birds and is not transmissible between humans. But if it were to swap genes with another influenza virus, possibly H1N1 (through, for example, a patient who contracts the two illnesses simultaneously), a new, more lethal pandemic strain could emerge with a high rate of contagion. "I would say that is an unlikely scenario," Hay says. "But the point is you don't know what's going to happen. You have...
...team is also on the lookout for changes in the virus that might make it resistant to the antiviral drug Tamiflu, which has been shown to reduce the severity of the disease caused by many flu viruses. Tamiflu works by inhibiting the neuraminidase enzyme (that's the N in H1N1) and preventing it from doing its job of helping the virus replicate once inside a human cell. But certain amino-acid changes in the neuraminidase can render Tamiflu ineffective. This usually happens over time following extensive prescribing of the drug, but it can also occur spontaneously. In the winter...