Swine Flu 6 Months Later: Relief, But Winter Looms
Now that the initial scare over the swine flu has subsided, health officials warn we are not out of danger yet.
“Weve got many, many months ahead of us where we dont know what will happen and we need to take the best steps we can to protect ourselves,” Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said last week. “Our biggest concern is that the virus could change, mutate to become more deadly.”
With winter approaching, another fear is a one-two punch in which a resurgent swine flu batters young people before the vaccine is widely available, while the ordinary flu strikes the elderly. Also, emergency doctors are worried about the strain on ERs and hospitals.
To date, swine flu has hospitalized hundreds of thousands of people around the world and killed at least 4,500, including at least 600 in the United States. At least 81 U.S. children have died, including many who had no underlying health problems
The CDC was the first to identify the new flu. It was on April 15 and 17 that the agency determined that nasal samples from two children in Southern California contained a swine flu virus that had never been seen before. It was found to contain bits of bird and human flu.
At first the cases represented more of a scientific puzzle than a public health threat. The two children recovered, but investigators were perplexed by how they got it, since the two kids had not been in contact with each other or with pigs.
But within a week, the situation became more dramatic, when testing linked the two children and a handful of subsequent U.S. cases to hundreds of illnesses in Mexico City. Mexican authorities closed schools, museums, libraries and theaters to stop the spread of the disease as initial reports suggested it was killing as many as one in 15 of those infected – a horrifying death rate more than three times higher than the terrible flu pandemic of 1918-19.
A series of bad and good news followed. First, the bad: It quickly became clear that the virus was spreading not only in Mexico and border regions of the United States, but around the world. As health officials had long surmised, international air travel provided a rapid path to world contagion.
Whats more, studies indicated the millions of seasonal flu shots administered the previous winter offered no protection against the unusual new virus.
But then came some good news:
-While the flu vaccine was no help, the antiviral medication Tamiflu reduced the severity of illness if taken right after symptoms appeared.
-People 55 and older, who suffer and die the most from seasonal flu each year, seemed mostly to be spared by the new virus. Scientists credited some immunity that they had perhaps picked up from exposure decades ago to a similar-enough virus or vaccine.
In the United States, some of the initial response plans for the new swine flu, an H1N1 strain, envisioned “people dropping dead in the streets,” recalled Dr. Beth Bell, a CDC epidemiologist who has been a leader in the agencys response.
The disease kept spreading, and eventually the World Health Organization declared it the first global flu pandemic in 40 years. But even before then, U.S. health officials had downgraded some of their prevention advice, such as the call for schools to shut down for two weeks if any students became infected.
“Overall, its a fairly typical flu virus,” Richard Webby, a prominent researcher at St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital in Memphis, says now.
But this story is not over yet. There are still important unanswered questions.
Most health experts believe swine flu hits children and pregnant women harder than seasonal flu, but its not clear how much harder because officials dont know exactly how many have caught the swine flu and had only mild symptoms.