Eeee-va
Happiest robot on Earth
- Joined
- Feb 18, 2009
Multiple sources are now saying that this flu is behaving more like a regular flu than a human-animal hybrid flu, which is overall very good news.
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-swine-flu30-2009apr30,0,4696825.story?page=2
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090429/WHO_panic_090429/20090429?hub=Health goes into depth on that idea, though I only found it after I'd typed up my thoughts.
Besides the lack of antibiotics and antivirals, the main reason the 1918 flu was so devastating was because it was a brand new strain of influenza (either a strain of avian or swine flu, depending on who you ask
), and so no one had acquired any resistance to it. This was similar to some of the diseases Native Americans got when Europeans came over, which were so deadly for the Native Americans because they had never caught them before.
But if this new flu continues to act like a human flu and not like a hybrid human/animal flu, then I would think that means its effects probably aren't that different from the regular flu strains we're all used to. (From that article it sounds like the recent US cases which are hospitalized or worse are mostly the elderly and the young, which is what you'd expect with a run of the mill flu virus.)
Unfortunately, about 30,000 Americans die of the regular flu every year, so it's still serious, especially for those in the "at-risk" groups. But I'm cautiously optimistic that if it now looks like a human flu and is transmitting from human to human, that there are no signs that it will evolve into something that we have no resistance to at all.
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-swine-flu30-2009apr30,0,4696825.story?page=2
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090429/WHO_panic_090429/20090429?hub=Health goes into depth on that idea, though I only found it after I'd typed up my thoughts.
Besides the lack of antibiotics and antivirals, the main reason the 1918 flu was so devastating was because it was a brand new strain of influenza (either a strain of avian or swine flu, depending on who you ask
), and so no one had acquired any resistance to it. This was similar to some of the diseases Native Americans got when Europeans came over, which were so deadly for the Native Americans because they had never caught them before.But if this new flu continues to act like a human flu and not like a hybrid human/animal flu, then I would think that means its effects probably aren't that different from the regular flu strains we're all used to. (From that article it sounds like the recent US cases which are hospitalized or worse are mostly the elderly and the young, which is what you'd expect with a run of the mill flu virus.)
Unfortunately, about 30,000 Americans die of the regular flu every year, so it's still serious, especially for those in the "at-risk" groups. But I'm cautiously optimistic that if it now looks like a human flu and is transmitting from human to human, that there are no signs that it will evolve into something that we have no resistance to at all.
