May take your mind off the daily political/economic outrages undermining our country–stopping to contemplate the profound devastation that mother nature can inflict. – Ilene
(Remember, for the backup site, with the blogroll, just click on my name.)
Fatal Swine Flu Shuts Schools in Mexico, Found in U.S. Cases
By Tom Randall and Andres R. Martinez, at Bloomberg
Swine flu struck hundreds people in Mexico City, California and Texas, raising the threat of pandemic and leading health authorities to distribute masks and shutter schools, museums, movie theaters and libraries.
At least 68 died and more than 1,000 became sick with flu- like symptoms in the Mexico City region in the past month, Jose Cordova, Mexico’s Health Minister, told reporters yesterday. Swine flu was confirmed in 20 of the deaths so far, he said. Of 14 tissue samples tested from Mexico, half were a genetic match with the swine flu reported in eight people in California and Texas, the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention said.
The new influenza strain, a conglomeration of genetic fragments from swine, bird and human viruses, is the biggest threat of a large-scale flu pandemic since the emergence of the H5N1 strain that has killed millions of birds and hundreds of people, said William Schaffner, an influenza expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.
“It recombined to create something totally new,” David Butler-Jones, Canada’s chief public health minister, told reporters yesterday. “How, when, or where it did that I don’t think we know.
“What it will lead to is impossible to predict,” Butler- Jones said. “It is very concerning.”…
“We are taking this very seriously,” Hartl said in a telephone interview from Geneva. The disease is affecting “otherwise healthy adults,” he said…
Flu can spread quickly when a new strain emerges because no one has natural immunity and a vaccine takes months to develop. The so-called 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed as many as 50 million people, began when an avian flu virus jumped to people, experts said…
The virus is contagious and spreading from human to human, the CDC said in a statement on its Web site…
GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s flu treatment Relenza and Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu appear effective against the strains of the virus the CDC has tested, the companies said. Glaxo has “ample supplies” of Relenza, Sarah Alspach, spokeswoman for the London-based drugmaker, said yesterday in a telephone interview…
Full Bloomberg article here.
For a cool chart, see Paul Kedrosky’s Visualizing Swine Flu in Mexico
