Word: influenza
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...health officials across the globe prepare for the possibility of a global pandemic of swine flu, they have a relatively new weapon in the fight against influenza; antiviral drugs, first developed in the 1990s, have been shown to help treat and prevent influenza. But such drugs have never been used to tackle a widespread outbreak of influenza before, and there are concerns they may quickly prove ineffective...
...healthy ones. So while not killing the virus, it helps the body fight off the disease by slowing its spread. This, in turn, may help prevent "acute respiratory distress syndrome" - the sudden worsening of flu that, along with secondary lung infections, is a main cause of death among influenza patients. There is also evidence to suggest that they can be used prophylactically - to prevent rather than treat the disease. "We don't have many tools in our medicine cabinet to fight this disease, but this is one of them," says Howard Markel, a physician and director of the History...
...there are more questions than answers. Most important among them: Exactly what is going on in Mexico, where epidemiologists are still working to understand the swine flu outbreak? Uncertainty, however, is unavoidable when it comes to influenza - a shifty, erratic virus that is harder to get a handle on than, well, a greased pig. "There is no standard picture for how this will develop," said Fukuda. "We don't know...
Peppered with questions about the issue in a tense press conference, Córdova responded that there had been mixed signals from the flu epidemic in La Gloria and most who had taken ill had suffered from a familiar form of the influenza virus. He also said the government had no model of the H1N1 virus - which has features of avian, pig and human viruses - to base their studies on. "We never had this kind of epidemic in the world," he said on Monday. "This is the first time we have this kind of virus." As if to underline the point...
...lunchtime on Sunday, in old Acapulco which is not a tourist haunt and a place for locals to gather, few people wore masks. The stalls that serve seafood cocktails and fried fish were full. I asked a couple who were having fried fish if they had heard of the influenza. Mariana, 29, a secretary for the State government, said, "Sure, we saw it in TV, but that is in Mexico City, not here...