Word: influenza
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...last time a new influenza virus reached pandemic levels was in 1968, but the episode was not significantly deadlier than a typical bad flu season. Few people who lived through it even knew it occurred. Still, it killed 34,000 Americans. The 1918 pandemic was far more lethal. It killed 675,000 Americans at a time when the U.S. population was 100 million. Fifty million to 100 million people perished worldwide in the 1918 pandemic, according to Nobel laureate F. Macfarlane Burnet. The flu killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years. The difference...
What will happen during the next pandemic? No one can predict, but even a virus as mild as the 1968 strain would kill many tens of thousands in the U.S. alone. Since 1968, demographic changes have made influenza a greater, not a lesser, threat. Our population now includes more elderly and more people with a weakened immune system. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that influenza kills 36,000 Americans in an average year. The CDC also calculates that a pandemic caused by a virus comparable to that of 1968 would kill between...
...would have to go wrong before it came to that. Even if the virus, H5N1, mutates into a strain that can jump from person to person, it's not inevitable that it will make it into Australia from Southeast Asia, says CMO Horvath, chairman of the National Influenza Pandemic Action Committee (NIPAC). It's likely the first cases of person-to-person transmission in Asia would occur in clusters, where local authorities, working alongside the World Health Organization and AusAID, would try to contain the virus by quarantining the sick and giving them - and those who've had recent contact...
...hardly seems to usurp or even credit the media or government’s attention in this time of extreme American crisis. But according to the World Health Organization, countries must now prepare for a worldwide pandemic and mobilize for “an all-out war on avian influenza.” As a reaction the Bush administration provided $5.5 million “in technical assistance and grants” to affected nations throughout Southeast Asia throughout the past year. On May 11, 2005 an emergency appropriations bill, signed by Bush, suitably gave a further $25 million...
With a laboratory death rate of more than 50 percent and a very significant chance of a international outbreak of the disease, H5N1 avian influenza has caused significant fear throughout the globe. This is also considering that the last global pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, caused more deaths than World War I combat: an estimated 20 to 40 million people throughout the world died from...