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There has been lots of news about H1N1 this week – most of it very good. First off, vaccine trials are going well so far. Second, several groups have advised that drugs and vaccines against swine flu should be reserved for the most at-risk (children, young adults and the elderly) and are not appropriate for healthy adults. And finally, so far the virus has not mutated as it goes through the winter (flu) season in the southern hemisphere.
These are all pieces of good news, but remember that we won’t really know the effects of this flu variant until the northern hemisphere flu season this fall and winter. In the meantime, here are our previous guidelines (from SF Gate) on staying healthy and safe, remain very sound advice…
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Is there anything someone who catches the flu can do to lessen the chance of it leading to pneumonia? One of my co-workers and her family had the swine flu recently. Her husband’s case progressed to pneumonia. I telecommute since moving rather far from the office so I hadn’t seen my co-worker in over a year. Hence, I wasn’t exposed to possibly catching H1N1 from her. but her experience made me aware that cases are occurring in my general vicinity (VA-DC-MD area).
Your sf gate post on swine flu guidelines cited a 5 out of 1000 death rate among those infected. I can’t find the source for that and was wondering if you had it at hand?
I teach a math class to middle school students and have been using swine flu as a probability case study on how to interpret what’s being printed, hence the interest in current data.
Thanks in advance.
The 5 out of 1,000 swine flu death rate you’re interested in is debated here at NewScientist – it’s debated as being both too high and too low, but ultimately, as I cited in my article, probably flawed. There are decent comments at the end of that article, including a discussion of CDC’s differing numbers.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17466-swine-flu-death-rate-estimates-flawed.html
The original journal reference is the BMJ: Journal reference: British Medical Journal (DOI: 10.1136/bmj.b2840)
What a great teaching exercise for your students! Have you considered being a BOGUS science teacher? (see the explanatory page on the top bar of http://www.docgurley.com for more details)
Best regards,
Doc Gurley
My brother got infected with H1N1 or Swine Flu in Mexico. He got a mild fever and luckily he did not die.