To me, it reads like a nice piece of fear mongering. As long as
everyone begins to believe that this flu this time around could kill
more than the common flu as it does every year, at least they won't
be left with a stockpile of vaccines of about 195.000 million.
At 02:55 PM 25/07/2009, you wrote:
If this virus hits hard there will be no need for forced
vacinations, the sheep people will be screaming for one and lined up
miles long..
Heres the article and link.
ATLANTA In a disturbing new projection, health officials say up to
40 percent of Americans could get swine flu this year and next and
several hundred thousand could die without a successful vaccine
campaign and other measures.
The estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are
roughly twice the number of those who catch flu in a normal season
and add greater weight to hurried efforts to get a new vaccine ready
for the fall flu season.
Swine flu has already hit the United States harder than any other
nation, but it has struck something of a glancing blow that's more
surprising than devastating. The virus has killed about 300
Americans and experts believe it has sickened more than 1 million,
comparable to a seasonal flu with the weird ability to keep
spreading in the summer.
Health officials say flu cases may explode in the fall, when schools
open and become germ factories, and the new estimates dramatize the
need to have vaccines and other measures in place.
A world health official said the first vaccines are expected in
September and October. The United States expects to begin testing on
some volunteers in August, with 160 million doses ready in October.
The CDC came up with the new projections for the virus' spread last
month, but it was first disclosed in an interview this week with The
Associated Press.
The estimates are based on a flu pandemic from 1957, which killed
nearly 70,000 in the United States but was not as severe as the
infamous Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19. The number of deaths and
illnesses from the new swine flu virus would drop if the pandemic
peters out or if efforts to slow its spread are successful, said CDC
spokesman Tom Skinner.
"Hopefully, mitigation efforts will have a big impact on future
cases," he said. Besides pushing flu shots, health officials might
urge measures such as avoiding crowded places, handwashing, cough
covering and timely use of medicines like Tamiflu.
Because so many more people are expected to catch the new flu, the
number of deaths over two years could range from 90,000 to several
hundred thousand, the CDC calculated. Again, that is if a new
vaccine and other efforts fail.
In a normal flu season, about 36,000 people die from flu and its
complications, according to the American Medical Association. That
too is an estimate, because death certificates don't typically list
flu as a cause of death. Instead, they attribute a fatality to
pneumonia or other complications.
Influenza is notoriously hard to predict, and some experts have
shied away from a forecast. At a CDC swine flu briefing Friday, one
official declined to answer repeated questions about her agency's own estimate.
"I don't think that influenza and its behavior in the population
lends itself very well to these kinds of models," said the official,
Dr. Anne Schuchat, who oversees the CDC's flu vaccination programs.
The World Health Organization says as many as 2 billion people could
become infected in the next two years nearly a third of the world
population. The estimates look at potential impacts in a two-year
period because past flu pandemics have occurred in waves over more
than one year.
Swine flu has been an escalating concern in Britain and some other
European nations, where the virus' late arrival has grabbed
attention and some officials at times have sounded alarmed.
In an interview Friday, the WHO's flu chief told the AP the global
epidemic is still in its early stages.
"Even if we have hundreds of thousands of cases or a few millions of
cases ... we're relatively early in the pandemic," Keiji Fukuda said
at WHO headquarters in Geneva.
The first vaccines are expected in September and October, Fukuda
said. Other vaccines won't be ready until well into the flu season
when a further dramatic rise in swine flu cases is expected.
First identified in April, swine flu has likely infected more than 1
million Americans, the CDC believes, with many of those suffering
mild cases never reported. There have been 302 deaths and nearly
44,000 laboratory-identified cases, according to numbers released
Friday morning.
Because the swine flu virus is new, most people haven't developed an
immunity to it. So far, most of those who have died from it in the
United States have had other health problems, such as asthma.
The virus has caused an unusual number of serious illnesses in teens
and young adults; seasonal flu usually is toughest on the elderly
and very young children.
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090725/ap_on_he_me/us_med_swine_flu>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090725/ap_on_he_me/us_med_swine_flu
Sam L.
--
A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take
everything you have.
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