H1N1 Flu: Thursday Update
With the flu outbreak settling into a rather steady pattern of rising numbers of generally mild cases, the WHO’s Keiji Fukuda (pictured) today brandished a big number to warn against complacency.
He said a third of the people on the planet — some two billion people — could be infected by the new H1N1 strain in the next year or two (though he went on to say that the figure was a possibility based on previous pandemics, and not a prediction or estimate of what will happen with H1N1).
“It is not simply an issue of, ‘Is it mild? Is it severe? If it’s mild, we should forget about it,’ ” he said. He pointed out that even a generally mild strain will cause serious trouble for some patients, and added that it’s still possible the strain could mutate and cause more severe disease in the future.
Meanwhile, the New England Journal of Medicine is publishing a raft of H1N1 papers online today (though not all of them have made it to the NEJM’s Web site as of this writing).
One article analyzes a strain of swine flu that emerged recent years and that, like the new H1N1 strain, combines genetic segments […]
Read more this great post here
