Second wave of H1N1 arrives earlier than predicted

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CTV News said:
The "second wave" of swine flu that public health officials have warned will hit Canada this fall may have already arrived. There have been three new confirmed cases this week in Toronto alone, following weeks of few new cases.


"It looks like the second wave is starting," Dr. Barbara Yaffe, director of communicable disease control and associate medical officer of health for Toronto Public Health, told CTV Toronto Thursday.

Dr. Donald Low, chief microbiologist at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, also thinks the second wave is already upon us. He told the Toronto Star Thursday that he's seeing an uptick in cases, noting that the new flu activity is so far concentrated in Toronto, Hamilton and London.

There have been very few cases of H1N1 in Ontario over the last several weeks, he said, but on Monday, six new cases in the province were confirmed. Those cases are "probably announcing the second wave of H1N1," he said.

Yaffe notes that just because the virus appears to be spreading again doesn't mean that many people are going to find themselves in hospital.

"It's hard to know how many people will be infected. It could be 10 per cent, it could be 30 per cent," she said, adding that the majority of infections to date have been not serious, bringing on the typical flu symptoms of headache, cough, and sore throat.

"They'll feel like a truck hit them but they'll generally recover in less than a week," she said.

Many public health officials have suggested that the second wave of swine flu would probably start much earlier that seasonal flu usually does, arriving as early as October, instead of the usual late December-early November.

The vaccine against swine flu, meanwhile, is not expected to be available to the provinces for vaccination programs until mid-November.

Most infectious disease experts are expecting that swine flu will "crowd out" other strains of the flu this fall, causing the majority of flu cases, just as it did during the southern hemisphere's winter.

Already in Mexico, reports suggest the second wave has hit there. Daily diagnoses of flu are up across the country, with 483 new cases in just one day this month alone.

With diagnoses already reaching higher levels in September than the peak of the first swine flu wave in April, Mexicans are being told to brace for an outbreak that may be larger than the one in the spring.
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http://news.sympatico.ctv.ca/Home/C...line=True&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc&date=True
 
Swine flu is hitting here as well. Thank god I only had the common cold for 3 days and I feel better now.
 
My little brother actually had it last week, I and the rest of the family were taking Tamiflu all week and I think I may have gotten a weakened version of it while I was on Tamiflu.
 
I'm a little tired of the manufactured fear of this. The worst that has happened to me was that my aunt came down with pneumonia, and she's already recovering. And she has MS. This is no worse than the standard flu we get every year. Hell, it's probably not even as bad.
 
Reuters said:
Fifteen states could run out of hospital beds and 12 more could fill 75 percent of their beds with swine flu sufferers if 35 percent of Americans catch the virus in coming weeks, a report released Thursday said.

The study, based on estimates from a computer model developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shows the strain hospitals and health departments could face as a second wave of swine flu surges.

"Our point in doing this is not to cry Chicken Little but really to point out the potential even a mild pandemic can have and how readily that can overwhelm the healthcare delivery system," Jeffrey Levi, director of Trust for America's Health, which sponsored the report, said in a telephone briefing.

According to the report, the number of people hospitalized could range from 168,025 in California to 2,485 in Wyoming, and many states may face shortages of beds.

Some may need to cut back on hospitalizations for elective procedures.

"States around the country will also have to figure out how to manage the influx of people in doctors' offices and ambulatory care settings, in addition to the surge in hospitalizations," Levi said.

He said state and local health departments are scrambling to set up distribution systems for the H1N1 vaccine as it becomes available this month, but challenges remained.

"These systems are untested, and glitches are sure to arise along the way," Levi said.

Local health authorities are especially worried about reaching young people, who traditionally are not vaccinated for flu, and minorities, who were harder hit by the swine flu in the spring.

While the federal government will pay for the vaccine itself, Levi said, it was not yet clear how the actual cost of giving the shot will be financed.

Although many public and private insurance plans have said they will cover it, others have not yet agreed.

"This could become a huge burden for state and local health departments, or become a dangerous disincentive for people to get a vaccine," he said.

The 35 percent attack rate used in the report is based on the 1968 flu pandemic, which was considered mild. It assumes an outbreak would last around eight weeks.

Levi said the number was consistent with World Health Organization statements predicting that up to a third of the world's population will become sick with the new H1N1 virus that was declared a pandemic in June.

The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said in August that 1,8 million Americans may need to be hospitalized and around 30,000 could die, assuming a 30 percent infection rate.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091001/ts_nm/us_flu_usa_preparedness_3
 
It's possible some people in my school have gotten it, including my mother.
 
Bah, it's not that big of a deal really.
A lot of people at my school have had Swine, it's not that big of a deal at all. I personally know 10 people who have had it, and it's not that bad in most cases (except for this one kid I know who I swear came down with it twice). Yes, having lots of people in hospitalization because of swine flu is a bad thing, but lots of people who have it don't go to the hospital for anything besides a check up.
 
When will people realise that Ambipom is a superior anti-lead than Mamoswine, and won't spread Monkey Flu around?

Swine flu is a greater hoax than Roswell.
 
Swine Flu is no hoax, it's just not been explained well to the general public. Most people seem to think that the fear is that millions of people will suddenly get infected and drop dead, and see the currently low mortality rate as evidence against it.

Problem is that it's a hell of a lot more complex than that.

The problems with Swine Flu are as follows.

1. Swine Flu is a direct descendant of the flu that caused the 1918 Flu Pandemic. Between 50 and 100 million people were killed in that pandemic, out of about 500 million infections (which itself was about 1/3 of the world population at that point). The various H1N1 strains have been responsible for pretty much every major flu pandemic since, including the pseudo-pandemic of 1947, the 1976 swine flu outbreak, and the 1977 Russian flu. The American CDC noted that the 1918 flu epidemic which killed hundreds of thousands in the United States was preceded by a wave of mild cases in the spring, followed by more deadly waves in the autumn

2. It's highly mutable. The current swine flu is in humans is the next generation of a swine flu in...well...swine, that turned up in the US in 1998. That flu in itself was scary enough, since it was a combination of 3 separate strains, one swine, one avian and one human, into one "super flu". That one didn't pass on into humans, but now this one is. This new flu, if it mutates again, could become a lot more dangerous very very quick.

3. It's highly infectious. Even if the mortality rate is (currently) about the same as a seasonal flu, it's going to infect a lot more people than would a seasonal flu, and kill a lot more people, based on that fact alone.

4. It's contagious without symptoms yet being noticeably present. In other words....if you get infected, you can quickly be infecting others before you even start to feel sick yourself.

5. It has a long incubation period before symptoms present. Combine that with the previous point, and you're looking at something which you're not going to be able to stop spreading. By the time you've already instituted scanners and the like at airports again, it's already gone through and it's already too late.

6. It screws up your immune system. You might not die from Swine Flu, but if you get even the most minor of infections in the following week or so after recovery, you could be up shit creek without a paddle.
 
@ Archaic:

There have always been viruses, they've always been mutable, they've always been contagious, and they will always exist. It's part of the human condition to have viruses like this, and man does not control the universe. There have always been cases like Swine Flu, and there always will be. One more instance is nothing to freak out about.
 
You've missed the point.
It's unusually highly mutable.
It's unusually highly contagious.
It's incubation period where it can be passed on without symptoms is unusually long.

This may not be something to freak out about, but it's not something to ignore. As pointed out earlier, even a minor pandemic could have massive effects. Seeing as the world economy is already down the toilet, that would be a very very bad thing.
 
This is nothing like 1918.

if you've ever read a book called Vaccinated: One mans quest to defeat the worlds deadliest diseases, in the book the guy predicted this as exactly 51years after the mini pandemic of 1958 (which by the way was an H1 virus)

there also was another pattern

H1
H2
H3
H1
H2
H3

with H1 being the most mild and H2 being the most lethal, so this whole thing has been overrated.
this is even on a lower scale then 1958, so as far as influenza we've been lucky this time around.
 
Arcane Mind said:
I'm a little tired of the manufactured fear of this. The worst that has happened to me was that my aunt came down with pneumonia, and she's already recovering. And she has MS. This is no worse than the standard flu we get every year. Hell, it's probably not even as bad.
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You can thank the public media for all this crap.


This is the equivalent of a bad cold with a fever involved, GOD.



Also, they said the only way this thing could become majorly killer were if an animal carried Bird Flu and Swine Flu at the same time. It would create a super-bug that was as deadly as Bird Flu and as easily spread as Swine Flu. THAT'S what people should be worried about.

Although the probability of that is very low.

I'm a very smart 12 year old huh? ^-^
 
ashfangirl said:
You can thank the public media for all this crap.


This is the equivalent of a bad cold with a fever involved, GOD.



Also, they said the only way this thing could become majorly killer were if an animal carried Bird Flu and Swine Flu at the same time. It would create a super-bug that was as deadly as Bird Flu and as easily spread as Swine Flu. THAT'S what people should be worried about.

Although the probability of that is very low.

I'm a very smart 12 year old huh? ^-^
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The problem with that theory is that the "swine flu" really hasn't crossed over into animals yet. There are only a few pigs that have caught it (less than one hundred) so it wouldn't work with animals. Another problem: the bird flu (H5N1) has not been able to spread from human to human.

Also, archaic is right. The problem with the influenza is that it is an RNA virus, and therefore mutates at an incredibly fast rate (compared to other viruses). So while this form of the flu is far from 1918 levels, it has the ability to mutate rapidly.
 
I've had it and it's like a regular flu. The media and some people around are seriously making it worse then it is. I've lived through it without any shots so Idk why other people have died from it.
 
.ιиsσмиιαc. said:
I've had it and it's like a regular flu. The media and some people around are seriously making it worse then it is. I've lived through it without any shots so Idk why other people have died from it.
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are you pretty much a normal, healthy person? a lot of the people who are having severe reactions to it have pre-existing medical problems, especially if they have any kind of lung issue or are smokers. not everyone is on equal footing with diseases. theyll always affect different people in different ways since not everyone is the same :p
 
Sync said:
are you pretty much a normal, healthy person? a lot of the people who are having severe reactions to it have pre-existing medical problems, especially if they have any kind of lung issue or are smokers. not everyone is on equal footing with diseases. theyll always affect different people in different ways since not everyone is the same :p
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I smoke on a regular basis and don't eat healthy at all. I'm like 140lbs and 6 feet tall...that's unhealthy. So yeah I'm skinny as hell and all and pretty damn unhealthy but it's easy as hell to beat the flu. Nobody over here in America apparently has ever heard of Oranges or eating healthy and resting when you're sick as hell.
 
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Protect yourselves!!
 
Yeah, my cousin's school in Michagan (actually, a LOT of schools in Michigan) got shut down for this. And my school lost 25% of its students. But thankfully they all recovered.
 
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