Word: viruses
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Swine flu arrived in Macon County, Alabama, last week, showing up in classrooms at all levels and leaving a spate of empty desks in its wake. But authorities are battling the virus on its own turf, using vacant seats as both a map and compass to stem the tide...
...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...
...That's a lot of moving statistical parts, and when it comes to an ongoing pandemic such as the current one with H1N1, it's especially difficult to get reliable data on how 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...
...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, had the pandemic begun earlier, in December or even January-when the World Health...
...predict what proportion of the population will be infected," says Varmus. "But it is very likely that something upward of 50% will be affected. All of us have a responsibility to blunt the epidemic by decreasing the spread of virus. If people understand that they can mitigate the epidemic by washing their hands and staying home when they are sick, it means the peak of disease will occur later, when there is more vaccine available." That could also help to keep the impact of H1N1-on the health care system, on families and on the economy in the form...