SWINE FLU Information

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heya all, i was just wondering, is swine flu fatal?

been looking for a stright answer all over the web and not found one yet. From my perception it's been said that swine flu has killed people... but "most" get over it and make a full recovery. Whilst i can guess that this means it's not i could do with a straight forward answer, meaning a yes or no, being an aspie and all .

Also, my personal opinion is that its not too worrying, we survived the bubonic plague and im sure that was probably mutch worse .

AFAIK, any flu can kill. To date there have been 31 laboratory confirmed deaths caused by swine flu. Only two have been in the US, and the rest were in Mexico. One was a two year old child and a woman with chronic health (and presumably immune) problems, which is to be expected with any flu.

The young, the old, and the immuno-compromised are usually the ones to die, and the reason this flu was causing such concern was because healthy young people seemed to be dying of it in Mexico. The thing to remember is that health care in Mexico is crap; in places where it's available people usually can't afford it, and on top of that they're in the middle of a civil war. Historically people in developing nations have died more of flus, so it's not that surprising.

Thank you JameAlec

I honestly didn't read most of this thread, but I can guarantee you that Swine Flu, for the most part, is no different than any other flu when it comes to how harmful it can be. The only thing that makes it significant is that it's a new mutation that makes the virus spread to other human beings. There are plenty of other influenzas which kill more people, or about the same.

But the mainstream media has been scaring us to death with this new one, like they were doing with SARS. SARS ended up being a very mild disease, and H1N1 has even been declared to be "less deadly than SARS".

The 80-or-so death toll in Mexico (or whatever it is now) has been rumored to be an exaggeration, but even if so, Mexico is a terrible country with terrible healthcare, so keep that in mind.

A lot of people also reference a deadly influenza from the 1920s, which turned into an epidemic and killed, what was it, over 50 million people? People fear this could turn into an epidemic such as that. However, our knowledge of medical treatment in those days was very minimal, and prevention, such as vaccines, were still in the fetal stage.

There was a vaccine developed in the 70s for preventing Swine Flu, due to a short scare about it. However, only a few people actually ended up catching it, and several more people died from the vaccine.

If the numbers I have seen are correct, the mortality rate is about 8%.



Can someone please tell me this: I know that people who already have some sort of health problem are more likely to develop severe influenza or even die. But does anyone know excactly what kinds of health problems they mean, and/or what the dead flu victims had? The only one I know for certain is those with newly transplanted organs.
I have asthma, allergies and some skin problems (very dry, sometimes excema, which makes the small pox vaccine more deadly for me). Do anyone know if these put me in the vulnerable category? I worry...

All your questions can probably be answered by

http://www.who.int/en/

And also CDC + Wikipedia. Read up on immunology and viral infection. Then you stop caring... until the next influenza wave this fall, which may come with a new mutated killer virus.
_

What is interesting about the virus is that it contains genetic material it have picked up from jumping from multiple species, which also tells that it is an effective zoonos virus that spreads easily from lifeform to lifeforms, and since it have spread to at least two other lifeforms (pigs and birds) the likelyhood it will mutate again is quite high.


P.S. oh, and stop reading/listening the mainstream media. They are at least 1-2 days behind the WHO reports and blow everything out of proportion with their "news" coverage and lack of knowledge in immunology.

Thank you, Ichinin!

Dont thank me, thank the makers of the TV show "House MD" that made me interested in the stuff