Word: infectivity
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...sort and compartmentalize all the information about swine flu will probably determine whether you take it seriously, ignore it or begin freebasing hand sanitizer to get through the day. As with all viruses, influenza's only function is to replicate itself. It makes you sneeze so it can infect a new host and reproduce. When it encounters resistance, it changes. For the brain, this is maddening: How do we capture a threat that routinely escapes from one box and reappears in another...
...previous flu pandemics are any measure, we may see spikes in infection once school gets under way. Kids in classrooms are major spreaders of infectious disease; they get sick, infect one another, then bring the disease back home. That's why officials are trying to get the new H1N1 vaccine tested and ready for use as soon as possible - the longer America's schoolchildren go unprotected, the bigger the H1N1 pandemic could become. (See pictures of thermal scanners hunting for swine...
...Science study also provided the first estimate of the person-to-person transmissibility of H1N1. The researchers calculate that every person infected by the virus will go on to infect 1.3 to 1.7 other people on average. (That number will probably be higher for schoolchildren - in one outbreak at a private school in New York City in the spring, each sick student infected 2.4 classmates.) As flus go, that makes H1N1 more transmissible than most - on par with the moderate 1957 Asian flu pandemic - which makes it particularly important to get a large chunk of the population vaccinated early...
...might be able to stifle the disease in its earliest stages. But even if the vaccines arrive too late to stop H1N1 from spreading rapidly now, they can help build population-level resistance to the disease going forward. The Science study estimates that without vaccines, the virus could infect as many as 2.2 billion people worldwide over the course of the year. "The virus will be with us for many years to come in many forms," said Longini. "It's important to start building up resistance...
Persons who enter the hospital's emergency room with upper respiratory complaints are issued a facemask and taken to a separate waiting room so as not to potentially infect others. He says he hopes healthy people with minor flu symptoms will follow the CDC's advice and stay home. "There's not much we're going to be able to do for you anyway, and we don't need you in the waiting room infecting the person with the broken arm or whatever," he says. "It's a virus, and it will work its course. If you're healthy...