Word: new
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...unpredictable the influenza virus can be. Although flu activity has been waning for the third week in a row, health officials warn that there are still four to five months left in the official influenza season, plenty of time for the virus to make its rounds and find new hosts. "The story of pandemics, and the story of H1N1 in general, is the story of persistent uncertainty where we never quite know what we are going to get or when," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public...
Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, and his colleagues studied the course of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic last spring in two cities - New York and Minneapolis - and determined that 0.048% of people who developed symptoms of H1N1 died, and 1.44% required hospitalization. Based on that data, published in PLoS Medicine, Lipsitch anticipates far fewer deaths from 2009 H1N1 than was initially believed. By the end of the flu season in the spring of 2010, Lipsitch predicts, anywhere from 6,000 to 45,000 people will have died from H1N1 in the U.S., with the number...
...clear, however, that past pandemics are an appropriate gauge for evaluating the current flu or that the new projections are based on complete data. The eventual death toll of 2009 H1N1 may be less grim than the outcomes of previous pandemics, but it should be noted that 90 years ago, and even 40 years ago, health officials lacked the antiviral therapies and nationwide vaccination capabilities that are available today. That may have contributed to pandemics having a more devastating effect on the health of past populations...
...new estimates are also less alarming than those provided - also by Lipsitch - to the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology last summer near the start of the pandemic. At the time, researchers had only patchy data on the number of people infected by, and seeking treatment for, the new flu. The initially bleak prediction of the impact of H1N1 - with up to 50% of the U.S. population becoming infected in the fall and winter of 2009, resulting in as many as 90,000 deaths - was based on modeling of previous pandemics...
...officials Thursday, about 10,000 Americans have died from H1N1 and 50 million - or one-sixth of the population - have been infected. The CDC says also that about 200,000 people have been sick enough to require hospitalization, and that most of them were adults under age 65. The new figures cover the first seven months of the pandemic, from April through mid-November, and represent a large increase over the previous estimates, which included data through mid-October and said H1N1 had killed 4,000 and infected 22 million. But experts said the jump was not surprising, given that...