Healthy And Young People Are Often Ill H1N1 Flu

Healthy And Young People Are Often Ill H1N1 Flu.
A year after the H1N1 flu chief appeared, the World Health Organization has issued peradventure the most full report on the pandemic's activity to date. "Here's the definitive reference that shows in black-and-white what many nation have said in meetings and talked about," said Dr John Treanor, a professor of c physic and of microbiology and immunology at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. The H1N1 flu disproportionately pretended children and young adults, not the older adults normally entranced by the traditional flu, states the report, which appears in the May 6 topic of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The review offers few new insights, said Dr Len Horovitz, a pulmonary artist with Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, omit "that pregnant women were more at risk in the second and third trimesters and the finding that avoirdupois and morbid obesity were also risk factors. Obesity is something that has not been associated with influenza deaths before".

The different virus first appeared in Mexico in the spring of 2009. It has since spread around the globule resulting in "the first influenza pandemic since 1968 with circulation outside the usual influenza opportunity in the Northern Hemisphere," the report's authors said.

As of March 2010, the virus has hit almost every country in the world, resulting in 17700 known deaths. By February of this year, some 59 million ancestors in the United States were hit with the bug, 265000 of who were hospitalized and 12,000 of whom died, the article stated. Fortunately, most of the indisposition tied to infection with H1N1 has remained to some degree mild, comparatively speaking.

The overall infection class is estimated at 11 percent and mortality of those infected at 0,5 percent. "It didn't have the philanthropic of global impact on mortality we might have seen with a more virulent epidemic but it did have a very substantial impact on health-care resources. Although the mortality was humble than you would expect in a pandemic, that mortality did occur very much in younger people so if you mien at it in terms of years of life lost, it becomes very significant".

Protection From H1N1 Flu Is The Same As From Seasonal Flu

Protection From H1N1 Flu Is The Same As From Seasonal Flu.
The tale H1N1 flu seems to percentage many characteristics with the seasonal flu it has basically replaced, a new study indicates. "Our results are further confirmation that 2009 pandemic H1N1 and seasonal flu have nearly the same transmission dynamics. People seem to be similarly transmissible when ill with either pandemic or seasonal flu, and the viruses are likely to spread in similar ways," said Benjamin Cowling, precedent author of a study appearing in the June 10 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The solid news is that this means the preventive measures health authorities have been recommending, such as usual hand washing, should be equally effective against pandemic flu. "Influenza is very difficult to contain, but in the know measures including the availability of pandemic H1N1 vaccines should be able to mitigate the worst of any further epidemics," added Cowling, who is an deputy professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong.

Cowling and his colleagues followed 284 household members of 99 individuals who had tested pigheaded for H1N1. Eight percent of the household contacts also level ill with the H1N1 virus, about the same transmission rate as seen for the seasonal flu (9 percent), the researchers found.

Viral shedding (when the virus replicates and leaves the body), as well as the stencil of genuine sickness, were also similar for the two types of flu. The "attack rate" (meaning the poise of people in the entire population who get sick) for H1N1 was higher than that for seasonal flu and the inconsistency was most pronounced among children. The authors hypothesized that this might be due to the fact that younger race seem to have lower natural immunity to the virus.