Word: tests
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the virus entered the United States last April, the Centers for Disease Control issued test kits to physicians around the country to record confirmed cases. But by late July, doctors stopped individual reporting, saying the flu strain had become so extensive that maintaining such detailed surveillance was time-consuming and likely underestimating the true number of flu cases in the U.S. The Alabama Department of Public Health came up with a new plan: tracking the virus through school absentee records, voluntarily shared by individual districts. (Check out a story on the rapid spread of the H1N1 virus...
While doctors can now test for the presence of ApoE4, you have to have two copies of a particular form of the gene to be at real risk of Alzheimer's. If you do have them, your chances of developing the disease increase 10- to 20-fold. So far, the Alzheimer's Association does not recommend widespread screening for the gene, even among those with a family history of Alzheimer's, since most people who have the risky version of ApoE4 don't have the necessary gene copies. But looking more closely at people who have a family history...
Read "Warning Signs: A New Test to Predict Alzheimer...
...many people are infected, how effectively the virus is moving from person to person, and how much disease it can cause. Death rates from H1N1 are particularly challenging, since making reliable projections requires comparing the total number of people infected with H1N1, as confirmed by a lab test, to those who have died from the disease. At the moment, officials don't know how many people have actually been infected with the virus; they can only count people who are sick enough to see a doctor or come to a hospital. For every person who shows up in a hospital...
...reason for the wait is biological. The first volunteers to test the new vaccine were inoculated in August, and because most people will not have any existing immunity to H1N1, it will require two shots, spaced three weeks apart, to educate the immune system to recognize H1N1, and another six to eight weeks after that to generate true immunity to the virus. That's when scientists will know if the vaccine provided enough protection to allow the bottled inoculations to be shipped. After decades of making flu vaccines, the scientists are sure they know what they're doing. Indeed...