Everything you need to know about Swine Flu
by Catherine Basham, beat blogger
(picture courtesy of Boston.com)
Public health emergencies and pandemic disease outbreaks tend to create media frenzies. Reports of swine flu are the latest examples dominating headlines everywhere. There’s no need to barricade yourself in a sterile environment, or walk around campus with a mask on, but here is what you should know:
A strain of swine flu has killed about 149 people in Mexico, and sickened another 2,000. It recently spread to the United States, including Texas, California, and New York. Its symptoms are similar to influenza’s and include fevers over 100 degrees, cough, lethargy, body aches, and in some cases nausea and vomiting. Initial outbreaks occur when people have contact with pigs, but it can then be passed to other humans in the same ways the flu can. It is not spread by eating pork products.
The number of confirmed swine flu cases in the U.S. is presently at 40. Alarmists are encouraged to keep the outbreak in perspective — regular influenza usually causes an estimated 226,000 hospitalizations and 36,000 deaths in the nation every year.
We’ve compiled these helpful resource to answer the rest of your questions.
The Center for Disease Control’s Key Facts on Swine flu: http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/key_facts.htm
Follow the CDC’s updates on Twitter: http://twitter.com/CDCemergency
Top 10 Tips to protect yourself: from the blog of Dr. Jan Gurley, an internist and Harvard Medical School graduate.
A statement from the World Health Organization’s Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan, who raised the level of influenza pandemic alert from phase three to phase four. Phases five and six represent represent pandemic levels, or widespread human infection rates.
There have been 28 confirmed cases in New York. Read the press release from SU’s Health Services about the threat to the university community.
Catherine Basham is a senior magazine journalism and policy studies dual major. She has written for The Daily Orange, The Student Voice, and interned with publications like Boston magazine and Design New England. Her interests are global health and national health policy and legislation. Every Tuesday, she will be covering these topics in her column “Healthy Affairs.” Stay informed, stay healthy.
She can be contacted at cvbasham@syr.edu.
You are right there Catherine. A/H1N1 Virus or also known as Swine Flu were fastly spread all over the world. What’s alarming here is, this virus gives death to most of its victims. This post of yours is a great help to help people know how serious this issue is. Thanks.