WHO Raises Swine Flu Threat Level 557
Solarch writes "Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, the WHO raised the pandemic threat level for H1N1 "swine flu" to 5. Global media outlets(such as CNN, Fox News, and the BBC) preempted normal broadcast coverage and immediately published stories on their websites. To clarify, the WHO's elevation is mainly a sign to governments that the virus is spreading quickly and that steps should be taken on a governmental level to stage supplies and medicines to combat a possible pandemic. Unfortunately, broadcast coverage focused on phrases like 'pandemic imminent' (CNN marquee).
In other news, patient zero, the medical term for the initial human vector of a disease, has been tentatively identified in Mexico."
I'll repeat what I heard elsewhere (Score:5, Interesting)
"Citation needed."
Seriously, I see Internet doomsdayers saying this, but I don't see the CDC saying this. So, can you provide a link to a reputable source for this? I'm genuinely interested in reading one. If not, then perhaps you should stop spreading it.
Re:Please let it be!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, there's certainly a section of the media that wants terrible news to happen. I don't think they consciously or overtly want stuff to happen, but deep inside, I do think that part of them does.
I think it's partially human nature though. I've found myself sort of bugged at times by part of me that wants a war to break out, or a pandemic to happen, or the stock market to tank, etc. I think it comes from oftentimes looking at news as fiction that happens far away. And for the most part it's true. If a war breaks out in Africa, for instance, for the majority of North Americans or whatnot, it may as well be fiction for how little it actually affects them.
tldr; When it doesn't directly harm them, IMO, people often look at news as fiction, and want a more exciting outcome.
And some just don't understand. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egypt-orders-slaughter-of-all-pigs-over-swine-flu-1676090.html [independent.co.uk]
Egypt began slaughtering the roughly 300,000 pigs in the country Wednesday as a precautionary measure against the spread of swine flu... Agriculture Minister Amin Abaza told reporters that farmers would be allowed to sell the pork meat so there would be no need for compensation.
Yeah, what's the price of pork in a vastly flooded market. Other stories on the subject report riots by the pig farmers and also note that the WHO says that you can't catch it from eating pork. This is more a case of the non-pork eating religious majority using this as an excuse to crap on the pork eating religious minority (and 'unclean' pig farmers.)
From a Hot Zone (Score:5, Interesting)
Allow me to explain my bias before embarking on this rant: I currently attend University of Delaware. At present there are 10 unconfirmed cases among the student body. Not a big number (total student number is ~13,000), but diseases do have a tendency to spread quickly among student populations.
What bothers me about this isn't that people are overreacting, which they are to a large extent. I don't feel the need to wander around with a surgical mask and I'm right in the middle of a hot zone. Rather, what bothers me is that people are underreacting. There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction that says that swine flu won't cause any sort of devastation; that it's not something to worry about.
The fact of the matter is that while they're probably right, there's no reason not to take simple precautions. So long as this is going on, I'll make sure to was my hands with soap and water after using the bathroom, to try to avoid sick people, and to go to health services if I start showing flu-like symptoms. On the other hand, I hear plenty of people at school saying that they don't care, that if they get it it's "just the flu." I see a lot of people here on /. saying that this is just a media circus and just for drug companies to capitalize on. Maybe you guys are right, but what if you aren't?
As I said, I'm biased since I'm in a hot zone, but I'd rather be safe about this than contract it.
Re:I'll repeat what I heard elsewhere (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod parent up. "Cytokine storm" is the new Internet meme lately.
With the grand WHO total of deaths being caused by H1N12009 being EIGHT, and the most well documented death so far being a 23 year old, the whole idea that this is killing otherwise healthy (a BIG assumption, this is Mexico, not the US, the health care system and environmental conditions in Mexico City is not very good in the former and absolutely terrible in the latter case) adults is isn't founded at all.
Still Unknown Case Fatality Rate (Score:5, Interesting)
1) more than 1% .1% to 1% .1%
2)
3) less than
We still don't know which range we're dealing with and, uh, like, it matters.
All it would take is to focus on a standard sample like Mexico City hospital interns, process their swabs STAT and count the deaths so far.
Seriously, folks, where are the adults?
Patient zero (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Um, no. (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite possibly genetic.
It is well known that people in equatorial regions have a genetic "resistance" to malaria, but at the same time have a markedly increased incidence of sickle cell anemia. The trait that allows for one also allows for the other, but if your living near the equator, your better off with the malaria resistance.
What may be good for the goose, ain't always good for the gander.
As it applies here, there may be some genetic trait MORE common to the locals that provides them with some advantage for their particular environment that is ALSO a determining factor in susceptibility to the swine flu.
One single genetic loci could be responsible for the differences in survival rates.
Re:Patient zero? Yeah, right. (Score:4, Interesting)
Mexico's response has been so disorganized they have no CLUE who "patient zero" is.
Yeah, the part I found especially interesting is, you've got this 5 year old with the swine flu, yet they test others in the town and it turns out this kid was the only person in town that contracted swine flu. Then they go and test the pig farm where they believe the kid may have contracted it from, and all the tests come back negative.
So you've got the original infection vector, but no identifiable source it could have been contracted from, and no identifiable recipients it could have been passed on to. Seems odd to me.
Re:Semi-Pandemic (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is the ONLY real story here.
If this is an average flu season at least a couple dozen kids in the US have died already from the standard A/B/whatever strains vs 1 for the swine flu.
I'll leave you to figure out i gave an very conservative guess according to the CDC. Mexico i have no clue.
It is still much more dangerous to cross the street for lunch, how about a banner to Stop for Pedestrians :(
Re:Semi-Pandemic (Score:1, Interesting)
It is thought that the reason older adults aren't affected as much by this strain is that they might have immunity from an earlier H1N1 variant from many years ago. Nothing sinister about that. If you weren't around thirty years ago, you don't have those anti-bodies.
Re:No evidence for "Cytokine Storm" (Score:3, Interesting)
it certainly is getting a lot of media attention
The media attention is due to zeitgeist, not anything in particular about the bug. We live in uncertain times, and people are scared, but mostly they don't have anything to be scared OF.
The economy is burning, they're worried about losing their jobs themselves or that their spouse will, or that they won't be able to keep up with their mortgage or whatever. The economic meltdown is happening slowly, though, and it's hard for people to stay worried about it, so an acute threat that can absorb all of that relatively unfocused anxiety is more than welcome.
We saw this in the late '70's and early '80's as well. One particularly remarkable case was that herpes was at one time considered a huge public health issue... until AIDS came along. While herpes is nasty, the focus on it had far more to do with generalized anxiety about the state of the world and the sexual revolution as boomers started to settle down and have families than any objective threat level.
So after the swine flu mess passes over, expect to see other stories of this kind popping up every few months until global economic conditions start to improve, or until a real threat finally materializes (or is manufactured) to take people's minds off their mundane worries.
It's always possible that this flu will turn out to be a real threat, although in the case of the 1918 flu there was a significantly increased death rate up to three years before: the rate of death from influenza in England and Wales was over 10,000 in 1915, and less than 6000 in the several years before.
The war may have had an effect on this, of course, providing many susceptible human hosts to allow the virus lots of opportunities to mutate into the hellishly virulent strain of 1918. So the odds are that this isn't going to be nearly so bad, but until it's past we won't know, and that could take up to a year, given that the 1918 virus was mild in the spring and unprecedentedly deadly in the fall.
Re:No evidence for "Cytokine Storm" (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if anyone in the history of the world has actually considered the times they lived in to be "certain"?
Re:Doesn't scare me at all (Score:4, Interesting)
Sigh...
If only this were just funny.
I actually had this conversation with a friend a year ago or so. Of course, they didn't express a desire to relish in raw pork. And it was related to the Bird Flu. But pretty much dead on the same.
Their reasoning was that Bird Flu wasn't going to be an issue because it couldn't "evolve" the ability of human-to-human transmission because... evolution was a bunch of nonsense. And the media had lost interest by that time so my friend thought it had all just been overblown.
But H5N1 (Bird Flu) hasn't gone away at all. This H1N1 (Swine Flu) may be bad; it may not. But even if it has low mortality rate, if it spreads quickly far and wide, it may increase the chance H5N1 picks up human-to-human. That would be very bad indeed.
Re:And some just don't understand. (Score:2, Interesting)
Given that the pigs farmers are almost all part of the Coptic Christian minority, which has a history of being oppressed, this doesn't surprise me at all. As parent says, it's not about the swine flu.
Re:Please let it be!! (Score:1, Interesting)
The guy told a brutal and personal truth that describes human nature in a way I've never seen before. It was, in every conceivable way, insightful. That comment (the GP, not you) is not only an example of what makes me read /., it is an example of what makes me read.
So tell me, what do pop psychologists think causes people to be self-deluded, hyper-critical jerks?
Re:Semi-Pandemic (Score:4, Interesting)
God I love my immune system and genetic oddities. I'm one of the few people that has the natural genetic resistance to HIV (descendant of Black Plague survivors) and my immune system is so strong I haven't touched a flu shot in over a decade and rarely get sick to begin with.
I won't need to be rich to survive! I just keep up my filthy habits that reinforce my immune system and laugh at the rich that need medication. As George Carlin said quite accurately: "Tempered in raw shit."
Yes, I used to play in sewers, quite often. Blowing shit up and hearing the reverberations go for minutes was a fave pasttime.
Evolution in action, folks. Watch closely!
Re:Semi-Pandemic (Score:1, Interesting)
Production for the "reserve" has been going full tilt since 2005. There are 15 million courses (not doses) available in the U.S.
I hate big pharma and crappy IP law, too, but... Uncle Sam picked up the tab for the manufacturing, and the companies here that have the ability have been cranking them out full-speed for a few years now.
Also, it's almost unimaginable that the U.S. population is going to need more than that, all at once. The Spanish Flu killed in waves, and had an estimated mortality rate of 2.5-5%, of the estimated 20% of the total population that got it. That's still 50-100 million people killed, which is horrible, and some areas had higher infection rates than others. But the mortality numbers can be confusing... see Case-Fatality [wikipedia.org].
So... in perspective, that we have any anti-virals at all is a huge advantage over those poor people in 1918-1919.... That we have stockpiles of millions of courses of it should be comforting to you. It is terrifying and this has the potential to be the most horrible thing our generation sees in our lives, but we do have a giant world public health machine that is ready to rock.
Re:Semi-Pandemic (Score:4, Interesting)
IMHO, it is several months too early to definitively conclude that this attacks healthy people harder, whether by cytokine storm or otherwise. Right now, all the people getting hit are young people because this is the very first wave of the illness. People who are most mobile and most social are most likely to be exposed first, so that's who we're seeing getting sick right now.
Almost all the people in the U.S. who have gotten sick are schoolchildren, but that's because they are the most mobile, once again. If you look at that in isolation, you might erroneously conclude that school-aged people in the U.S. are more vulnerable, when in reality, they were merely the first to be exposed.
Only when you look at the data over a long period of time in aggregate can you say for certain that it hits younger people harder. In a few months, if the pattern holds, then we know this resembles bird flu in its behavior. Initially, though, it could just as easily be blamed on mobility, greater probability of living alone (and not seeking health care early enough), or any number of other causes that have nothing (directly) to do with age.
The more interesting question, IMHO, is why there have been no U.S. deaths yet except for a small Mexican infant visiting this country. There are several possibilities:
It's way too early to say much about this so far. Right now, there's a lot of speculation and precious little accurate data.
Re:banning handshakes and greeting-hugs-kisses (Score:3, Interesting)
As soon as viruses or bacterias are exposed to a sun light and a fresh air they began to die or at least get weakened. Some can survive only seconds of such exposure.
We, who saw it in experiments at the microbiological laboratories, should bring this awareness and advice into societal consciousness. It is not about being unfriendly, but about changing a dangerous habit.
There are 6 billions people on Earth now. The handshakes and greeting-hugs like sparks in a room full of a powder. It is the perfect way for viruses to spread in a geometrical progression. What is even more worse is that this European culture of handshakes and greeting-hugs spreads around the world. Indeed, why not using a bow instead?
Re:Patient zero? Yeah, right. (Score:3, Interesting)
Smithfield is quite 'well known' for its intensive pig farming techniques, let me show you a few links
http://nationalhogfarmer.com/mag/farming_smithfield_draws_mixed/ [nationalhogfarmer.com] this is from an industry site not environmentalist hippies
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4035081.stm [bbc.co.uk] BBC report.
http://www.saplonline.org/pubs/Quarterly/07-56-04/07_56_4p1415.htm [saplonline.org]
Here's an extract from the third link.
"When biology student Dana Spinu and I visited Timisoara a few weeks before the Smithfield takeover, we found officials and academics naively unprepared for what awaited them. We were invited to Paderini, one of six Contim farms being operated by a Romanian firm, in its last days of independence before being swallowed up. In contrast to US and Polish hog factories, the operation was scrupulously clean. The effluent was pumped to sewage ponds a kilometer away; the feeder pigs had four times more room than in the United States, twice that required under EU regulations. Piglets were weaned at 36 days and took six months to reach market weight. My description of Smithfield practices--piglets weaned at 11 days and brought to market weight at 120 days, feed doped with growth enhancers and antibiotics, dumpsters overflowing with dead animals--was greeted with incredulity by company veterinarians. "Impossible! Illegal! It can't happen here!"
Smithfield's first move upon its arrival was to fire former managers, post guards at hog factory gates, and order employees to say nothing about their work. Evidence of high level corruption was not long in coming. Local officials were ordered to keep "hands off" the company; academic critics were disciplined. Smithfield's relationship with the neo-liberals who came to power in 2005 was even more intimate. Free of interference, even exempted from EU regulations until 2012, Smithfield moved rapidly to consolidate its position, reactivating the Contim farms, and buying refrigeration and transportation companies. While the government shut down small slaughterhouses (ostensibly because of the EU), leaving small farmers with no place to market pigs, Smithfield flooded the country with pork imported from Poland and the United States.
In July 2007, however, Smithfield encountered an opponent that it could not bribe. At Cenei, west of Timisoara, 3,500 Smithfield pigs died suddenly. The company blamed it on a heat wave, but nauseating piles of carcasses attracted the press, and the county veterinary inspectorate was forced to do its job. On Aug. 3, it discovered classical swine fever, a viral disease long endemic in Romania, among Cenei's 20,000 pigs. At this point, the "hands off Smithfield" policy came to an abrupt end. The county disease control center halted all movement of Smithfield hogs, freezing its operations; the National Veterinary and Food Safety Authority began emergency inspections of the entire Contim system. Within a few days, two more infected farms with 30,000 pigs were discovered at Igris, on the Hungarian border.
At the same time, it was learned that 11 Smithfield farms had not even applied for sanitary-veterinary authorization and were operating in blatant contempt of Romanian law. Agency head Radu Roatus excoriated local officials and announced that the unregistered farms would be shut down. Agriculture Minister Decebal Traian Remes confirmed that all exposed pigs would be killed and incinerated, and he suggested that the company "probably" would not be compensated for them. Muzzles removed, lesser officials blamed the Americans. "Our doctors have not had access to American farms to perform routine inspections," said Timis county veterinarian Csaba Doraczi. "Every time they tried they were pushed away by the guards." It even came to light that Smithfield workers are paid so little, about $230 US a month, that the company suffered fro
Re:Please let it be!! (Score:4, Interesting)