H5N1
tsmith | April 10, 2013I have a new article up today at Slate, examining the emergent H7N9 avian influenzas, and a bit of a review of "bird flu" in general:
While we were carefully watching H5N1 in Asia and Europe, another influenza virus—2009 H1N1—appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Ultimately traced back to swine, this virus was easily spread between people, but unlike H5N1, it wasn’t any more deadly than our normal yearly influenza viruses (which, it should be noted, still kill on the order of 36,000 Americans each year). And now, while we’re still working on understanding how H5N1 and H1N1 have jumped between…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
ddobbs | October 2, 2009Been a while, so these cover a span of reading.
I'm in the midst of my friend Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, and can report that Mr. M is quite a poisonous but complicated handful -- a dark and deadly echo of his hero and model, Alexander -- and this reconstruction a splendid read.
A few weeks ago I finished Thomas Ricks' The Gamble, an excellent account of the surge in Iraq. Ricks -- who earlier wrote Fiasco, a devastating indictment of the run-up to the war, makes three things quite clear:
The surge was not about more soldiers…
ddobbs | September 3, 2009The damage done resembles that found in bird flu as well as 'acute respiratory distress symptom,' reports Branswell - the latter being a condition that can rise from a number of causes, and which kills 30% of those who get it. (That is, get ARDS, not swine flu.)
Yet more signs that this is a strange strain.
edyong | August 10, 2009People infected with the bird flu virus - influenza A subtype H5N1 - go through the usual symptoms of fever, aching muscles and cough. The virus is so virulent that 60% of infected humans have died. But according to a study in mice, the infection could also take a more inconspicuous toll on the brain, causing the sorts of damage that could increase the risk of diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's many years after the virus has been cleared.
The link between influenza and Parkinson's disease is hardly old but certainly controversial. Previous studies have found no traces of flu genetic…
cwilcox | May 14, 2009When the media first caught wind that people had gotten sick with an Avian influenza virus, they began spreading fear about a global epidemic. The strain in question, H5N1, is devastating to birds. It's killed millions of poultry in Asia alone, and disease experts worried that close contact with infected animals might give the virus the opportunity to exchange genetic material with a human influenza virus, allowing the deadly avian flu to be spread person to person.
All and all, 248 humans have died from the H5N1 according to WHO data as of January 2009. H5N1, as a strain, infects more…
ddobbs | May 6, 2009I've noted several times here how more measured heads keep emphasizing that a) we're working on partial information in responding to the current swine flu outbreak and b) new developments may complicate things at any point along the line.
Here's a great example of what these folks (like Effect Measure, Crof, and Avian Flu Diary) are talking about.
From Reuters :
Second strain of flu may complicate picture-study
06 May 2009 15:02:09 GMT
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON, May 6 (Reuters) - A second strain of influenza, one of the seasonal strains, may have mutated and may…
ddobbs | May 6, 2009In a post titled "Dead, Your Majesty," H5N1, Crof ponders why we scramble to deal with swine flu while ignoring other problems ranging from cancer to the 3000 children a day who die of malaria in Africa :
Most of us are comfortably settled in rich industrial countries where problems like TB and AIDS are rarely in the news. Zimbabwe, like our own homeless, is a deplorable problem...but not our problem. We'd prefer to focus, via high-speed internet connections, on a conjectural disaster instead of the many real disasters killing people somewhere else.
If a thousand people died in the US…
ddobbs | May 1, 2009Theme of the day (again, sort of): managing expectation, or Do I panic or just ignore this thing and scoff at those who express concern?
Neither, of course.
I'm personally provisionally encouraged at the aggregated news from yesterday -- meaning I was glad to see that though the virus is spreading, its pace doesn't seem to be wildly accelerating and, more important, there are some signs that it's not (at this point) horrifically virulent; some experts are saying it might not be much worse than a regular seasonal flu, and the warming weather is on our side.
Same time, it makes sense to take…
ddobbs | April 29, 2009This swine flu business is moving fast now, with confirmed or reported cases popping up everywhere and the first reported death outside Mexico -- a 23-month-old child in Texas -- reported this morning. As Effect Measure notes
Some of the fear [generated in the U.S. by this deat] will be lessened by the new knowledge that the baby contracted the disease in another country. The empathy remains, as it should. Mexican babies are still babies, loved by their parents and grandparents even while being hostages to fortune like everyone.
As this outbreak moves forward we will be barraged by numbers…
ddobbs | April 28, 2009The excellent blog H5N1 (now covering H1N1 as well, and all over it), points us to the New York Times for an op-ed by John M. Barry, author of the definitive history of the Spanish flu in the US: Where Will the Swine Flu Go Next? Excerpt:
As the swine flu threatens to become the next pandemic, the biggest questions are whether its transmission from human to human will be sustained and, if so, how virulent it might become.
But even if this virus were to peter out soon, there is a strong possibility it would only go underground, quietly continuing to infect some people while becoming…