Category: Tracking the Flu Outbreak: Tuesday

Sarah Rubenstein
This live blog will track developments Tuesday related to the outbreak of the new H1N1 flu, from The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires and other news services. For more coverage of the flu, see the WSJ.com Flu Outbreak page and the WSJ.com Health Blog.
To see other daily editions of this live […]

JGrimes
With regular tallying of new cases of A/H1N1 swine flu — as of yesterday it had sickened 898 people around the world — you might think it’s pretty easy to find out if whatever you’ve come down with really is that strain of the flu.
Not necessarily. Just ask Joe Lauria (pictured), a correspondent […]

JGrimes
Mexico has changed the way it reports its figures on victims from the new AH1N1 virus, waiting to get laboratory confirmation of cases rather than trying to speculate.
Until a few days ago, Mexico’s local virology labs didn’t have the equipment to identify the new strain of bug, so they had to send samples […]

Ron Winslow
Nearly half of Americans are concerned they or someone in their immediate family may get sick from swine flu during the next 12 months, says a survey out from the Harvard School of Public Health. And plenty of people are changing their behavior to try to avoid the bug. Here’s what they […]

JGrimes
Why does the H1N1 flu appear more severe in Mexico than elsewhere? Maybe because there were many, many mild cases that went undetected there, skewing our sense of the severity of the disease. That possibility has been suggested for a while now, but a paper published late yesterday in the CDC’s Morbidity and […]

JGrimes
Marie-Paule Kieny, director of the WHO Initiative for Vaccine Research, is talking to reporters about the flu outbreak. Here’s what she’s saying.
11:05 “It would be critically important to have a vaccine if you want to stop a pandemic, which might be coming with this virus.”
11:06 Would the seasonal flu vaccine be effective against […]

JGrimes
Epidemiology is full of detective stories, and this morning’s papers tell some of the tales that surround the first days of the current outbreak. Here are a few that caught our eye.
This WSJ narrative opens with Mexico’s health minister grabbing a red-phone hotline to the country’s president. “Mr. President, I need to see […]

Jacob Goldstein
This live blog will track developments throughout Friday related to the outbreak of the new H1N1 flu, from The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires and other news services. For more coverage of the flu, see the WSJ.com Flu Outbreak page and the WSJ.com Health Blog. Also, see yesterday’s live blog and […]

JGrimes
Richard Besser (pictured), the CDC’s acting director, is giving today’s media update on swine flu. Here’s what he’s saying.
11:41 There are 109 confirmed cases in the United States. There are eleven states with confirmed cases, many more states with suspect cases. South Carolina has been added to the list of states with confirmed […]

JGrimes
That picture at the right may look like a high-school cafeteria, but it’s actually a state-of-the-art flu-vaccine manufacturing facility. Which says something about the state of vaccine manufacturing.
Despite a broad push by government and industry to come up with faster ways to make flu vaccines, most are still made by a decades-old technique […]