Posts Tagged ‘over’

WHO Declares Swine Flu Pandemic Finally Over

WHO Declares Swine Flu Pandemic Finally Over
GENEVA (AP) _ The World Health Organization acknowledged Tuesday that the swine flu pandemic is finally over, long after many national authorities started canceling vaccine orders and shutting down telephone hot lines as the disease ebbed from the headlines. The official death toll _ once predicted to be in the millions _ reached 18,449 last [...]

Read more on KCBS Radio San Francisco

Flu season not over, but lessons emerging

Now, eight months later she has the answer. The 2009 flu pandemic was not the disaster public health authorities had planned for — one that, like the 1918 Spanish flu, would kill tens of millions around the world.

But it’s been pretty bad, with hundreds of patients hospitalized in Minnesota and a tragic death toll among the state’s children. It’s also held enough surprises to keep public health experts guessing all the way.

“The virus didn’t read the playbook,” Ehresmann said in an interview last week.

For now, the H1N1 outbreak is in a lull, but it may return before the winter is out. Looking back on the year, experts say they’ve learned some lessons from the Great Flu Pandemic of 2009. One: Expect the unexpected. Two: Don’t over-promise, especially when it’s a vaccine. Three: Worst-case scenario planning pays off.

“When you don’t know what’s in front of you, you really have an obligation to prepare for the worst,” said Patsy Stinchfield, director of infectious disease at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota. “And if the worst doesn’t happen, we’re all thankful.”

The virus debuts

In Minnesota, the first case of what was then known as swine flu appeared April 30 at a middle school in Cold Spring. Reporters and disease experts from the Minnesota Department of Health descended on the small town. Two schools and a senior citizens center were closed. Gov. Tim Pawlenty ordered the state plane to ferry the specimen to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta for testing.
By the time the outbreak’s first wave ended, two months later, experts knew H1N1 wasn’t likely to be as bad as the virulent 1918 Spanish flu. But for reasons that are still not entirely clear, it was more dangerous to children, young adults and pregnant women than it was to the elderly.

The CDC rushed to commission a vaccine, hoping it would be ready for fall, when they knew H1N1 would return with a vengeance. But vaccine manufacturing processes are old, slow and unpredictable. Even if everything went right, it would take six months.

In the absence of a vaccine, Ehresmann and her colleagues knew Minnesota needed stopgap measures, and their only tool was to encourage the public to contain the virus itself. The “wash your hands, cover your cough” message became a public health mantra.

Just as expected, the outbreak resumed as soon as school started. By mid-October, school absences were mounting, hundreds of people were landing in the hospital — and as authorities feared, the state’s health care system was taxed to the limits.

Nowhere was the outbreak more dramatic than at Twin Cities’ children’s hospitals.

“We were ground zero,” said Stinchfield at Children’s. In all, 328 children were hospitalized there with H1N1, 50 of them in intensive care. So many kids poured into Children’s emergency rooms — a record 400 a day at the peak in October — that the staff had to convert a day clinic into an overflow ER.

It may not have been the pandemic everyone feared, Stinchfield said, but it was bad enough. “I hope that the words ‘just’ and ‘flu’ are not in the same sentence ever again,” she said.

Most children recovered within a few days, but many needed chest tubes and ventilators; at least one child was hospitalized for two months, and some were left with permanent brain damage.

Meanwhile, a surprising number of healthy, younger adults were devastated by H1N1, including Krystal Alwin, 28, who now lives in east St. Paul. She got sick on a Friday in October. Because she didn’t have health insurance, she waited until Monday to see her doctor. Her clinic immediately called an ambulance — then asked if she had a living will.

“I felt sicker after hearing that,” she said last week.
Alwin was on a ventilator and in a coma for two weeks at United Hospital in St. Paul before she woke up in the intensive care unit. She’s recovering now and looking for a job. But she lies awake nights worrying about how she will pay off her $300,000 hospital bill.

“I should never have waited,” she said. “If I had [gone] in on Friday I would have been fine.”

Vaccine delays

A vaccine might have helped patients like Alwin, too. But unexpected manufacturing problems turned the supply into a trickle and confounded the optimistic promises of federal health officials.

Clinics were flooded with calls from patients seeking vaccine. At day care centers and school events, mothers exchanged tips on where to find it. When Park Nicollet Clinic announced it had a limited supply, its switchboard crashed.

“The pressures to say we’ve got the vaccine … made us paint a much more rosy picture than was actually [true],” said Stinchfield. If, instead, federal health officials had warned it wouldn’t be widely available until January, they would have looked like heroes when it started arriving in October.

That, Stinchfield said, “was probably the only thing I think people would want to take back and do over.” All the experts agree that one of the major lessons learned last year is that it’s time to develop a better, faster way to make flu vaccine.

Once it became clear that initially there would be a shortage, Minnesota, in contrast to other states, devised a lottery system to distribute the vaccine to local public health agencies and clinics. Officials started with those who took care of the sickest children and gradually expanded to others as supplies increased.

At the height of the outbreak in October and November, state health officials took heat from many who wanted the vaccine but couldn’t get it.

Ehresmann said she has no regrets because the plan worked. Vaccine went to the vulnerable first. There was no outcry here as there was in New York, when Wall Street firms gave shots to employees.

But, Ehresmann says, she would give federal and state public health agencies a grade of “D” in managing public expectations. “We have to talk more about the reality of shortages and what it means,” she said.

Government seeks to reassure public over swine flu

The public’s being urged not to panic about swine flu after the deaths of two people who contracted the virus are under investigation.. Follow us on twitter at twitter.com

Egyptian Farmers Face Massive Pig Cull Over Swine Flu

The confusion over the severity, and possible spread, of Swine Flu continues.  Depending on what papers or articles you read, which television coverage you watch or what you have seen through the internet, a multitude of conclusions can be drawn.  But they all seem to share a common theme, and that is of confusion and doubt.

Good being that with the levels of regulation in this country, and the respect that the British farmers enjoy, people looking for a quality reared meat might opt for insisting on British produce, regardless of cost.  A situation that British farmers may be welcome of, regardless of how it came about.

The possible negative could be panic over the consumption of pork, and a knee jerk reaction by some of the population to remove it from their diet, completely.  Fears like this have been quelled by both The World Health Organisation, and our own Environment Secretary, Hillary Benn. Reiterating that it is not possible to pass this flu by the consumption of properly cooked pork, and that there are no cases of this disease being present in the EU, and ongoing continual testing ensues that if it does appear, the affected stocks will be removed from the food chain.

There were some warnings issued about cheap illegal imports, and the health of such animals, but this was probably just a good opportunity to hammer home that advice.

But, rather more predictably, in foreign climes the reaction to Swine Flu has not been so consistent and clear.  In Egypt the government ordered the slaughter of all its countriesâ?? pigs.  Despite no reported or confirm cases of Swine Flu in the country, the decision was taken to get rid of all the nationâ??s pigs.  Understandably this decision was met with a lot of anger, and there were clashes in Cairo between police and protesters, concerned about this apparent overreaction by the government to slaughter an estimated 300,000 pigs.

Initially the decision was announced as a precaution to prevent a spread of Swine Flu, a move condemned by many experts, who confirmed this action would be completely inappropriate and pointless.  However the Egyptian government later conceded that they had used this reason as motivation, and a smoke screen, to attack bigger issues.

Agriculture minister, Saber Abdel Aziz Galal told Agence France-Presse, that wholesale changes were required for the future of pig breeding in the country, and that current conditions were unacceptable. â??At the moment the pigs live with dogs, cats, rats, poultry and humans, all in the same area with rubbish. Within two years the pigs will return, but we need first to build new farms,” he said.

IT’S ALL OVER, FOLKS. SWINE FLU WAS A FAKE ALARM

Itâ??s all over, folks. Swine Flu was a fake alarm, and the guilty parties are scrambling to save their asses and careers. The latest defector from the manure pile is Dr. Richard Schabas, former chief medical officer of health in Ontario, Canada.

Schavas spoke with the CBC network in Canada and laid it on the line. Swine Flu=Fake Who will be the next medical bureaucrat to opt out of the big scandal and wash his or her hands of the whole affair?

There comes a time in every phony public relations campaign when the stakes are much too high, the consequences much too heavy and the insiders begin wondering which way to jump.

An announcement by the US CDC was the latest trigger. CDC claimed on the basis of absolutely no evidence, since they had suspended testing for Swine Flu way back in July that 22 million people in the USA have had Swine Flu. Wow talk about desperation. Insiders immediately began asking themselves: Can I go along with this preposterous charade?

Here is an excerpt from the Canadian story:

H1N1 a ‘dud’ pandemic, Ont. health official says the huge investments governments made in swine flu pandemic planning might not have been justified, an Ontario health official said Thursday.  “It’s really not causing and is not going to cause and nowhere has caused significant levels of illness or death,” said Dr. Richard Schabas, Ontario’s former chief medical officer of health.

“But governments moved ahead regardless. They ramped up their response, spent a huge amount of money on vaccines and other things. I’m not sure the $1.5 billion includes the cost of new ventilators, the cost of Tamiflu stockpiles â?¦ the huge investment that’s been put into planning for what has ultimately turned out to be, from a pandemic perspective, a dud.”

Schabas is now the chief medical officer of health for Hastings and Prince Edward counties in eastern Ontario. The Globe and Mail reported that Canada has so far spent $1.5 billion on the H1N1 vaccination campaign, twice as much as health officials had predicted.

People stand by for more defections. And it isnâ??t going to be very prettyâ?¦

WARNING! Truth behide Swine flu! http://gotomustseenews.blogspot.com/

(AFX UK Focus) 2010-03-29 21:50 Swine flu season not over, US health officials warn

(AFX UK Focus) 2010-03-29 21:50 Swine flu season not over, US health officials warn
By JoAnne Allen

Read more on Interactive Investor

Panic Over the Not So New Swine Flu

For several years the media has been cautiously following the possibility of a bird flu outbreak, but swine flu has beaten it to the punch.  Influenza is a nasty little virus that can be deadly under the right conditions, and bird flu is a particularly bad strain that is deadly more often.  No matter which strain happens to be floating around; the symptoms are the same; coughing, sneezing, aching and fever.  If you have a cold, this could also describe how you feel except for the fever; which only occurs with the flu.  Education is always the best way to combat fear, so knowing the facts about influenza can help ease the mind.

There are dozens of different possible flu strains that can circulate through the population at any one time.  Once you get one of these strains, your body learns to produce a defense against that particular strain and you can’t get it again after your body beats it.  If you could get all of them, you would never get the flu again; but only a few strains float around at once.  As time passes and new people are born, old strains begin to come back and infect a whole new population with no immunity.  About 2% of all the people who catch the flu will die from it due to complications like old age and compromised immune systems.  The worst outbreak happened in 1918 and killed about 20% of everyone who contracted the virus, but our knowledge is far greater now than it was then.

The first thing to remember about swine flu is that it’s just another flu strain; and this isn’t the first time we have seen it.  Every year doctors guess which strains will float around the population and they produce a vaccine to fight them.  Swine flu wasn’t what they guessed for this year, but even last years flu vaccine seems to be partially effective in preventing people from getting this strain.  It also responds very well to every type of treatment we currently use to fight influenza.  All in all, less than 1% of people who catch swine flu die from it; so it’s even lighter than just a regular flu.

The last time swine flu showed up was in 1976, and just like now there was a large panic in the population because of bad information.  The government spent millions of dollars on a flu vaccine that did little to help with the strain, and people were urged to get the shot for the whole family.  When it was all said and done, more people had died from the vaccine than from the flu itself because the strain never swept through the population.  This time around, it is more widespread and it appears to be hitting the population with a fury.  A feverish, achy, take a couple days off and you will be fine fury.  You may get it and you may not, but unless you are at risk from any other virus; it isn’t anything to really worry about.

If you have a fever and it rises over 102, it’s time to go get treatment; regardless of the cause of the fever itself.  Health insurance or discount plans like Ameriplan will help with the cost, so don’t hesitate to go to the doctor if you find yourself in this situation.  Another warning sign that you may be at risk is if the symptoms are still getting worse after the fourth day.  Most people have had at least one strain of the flu in their lives, and it isn’t much fun; but the panic that is currently in the media is unfounded.  Over the course of 2009 we will most likely see this strain slow down and then resurge later in the year, and some people will die from it.  Given the choice though, swine flu is easier to deal with than the various other flu strains we see every other year.