Swine flu pandemic fears

Aussiejeff said:

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PS: What next? Federal Police to set up US/Mexico style armed border crossing checkpoints along the VIC state borders and refuse Vics entry to other states?

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I don't think voluntary whatever does work in Australia.

Plastic bags in ocean, speed limit, cigarette butts and now home flu crap.

Does anybody believe that people do not take mask off and hop in a car to urgently do something somewhere?

swine flu has been around since mr burns was a toddler .

since we are now finding out the truth about the Vic bushfires...and how everybody charged with any responsibility , took none whatsover...who could stuff up did so....and who shirked any responsibility.........
leaving hundreds to die.....
then....it stands to reason that ....
I find it really hard to believe that Vic has about 95% of the total confirmed with it...
I seriously wonder what the Vic health dept is testing for ....maybe they are just testing to see if everyone has urine in their system or something just as silly...
its just unbelievable that everyone who has swine virus lives in Vic....and not in the other states...
or is the testing equipment contaminated in the first place ????

seasprite said:

swine flu has been around since mr burns was a toddler .

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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH that actually brought a tear to my eye

cheers

kincella said:

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its just unbelievable that everyone who has swine virus lives in Vic....and not in the other states...
or is the testing equipment contaminated in the first place ????

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4 June 2009: The total of confirmed H1N1 Influenza 09 cases in Australia as at 1200 AEST has increased to 639 – up five from this morning. Most of the new cases reported in recent days are in Victoria. Tasmania has three new cases this morning. Queensland now has 28 confirmed cases. The latest cases are two students from Cairns. One attends St Monica’s Catholic College and the other Cairns State High School. Cairns State High School will be closed from this morning and will re-open on Tuesday if no further cases are reported. The same precautionary closure conditions apply to Warwick State High School where a student, whose sibling has tested positive, has shown symptoms suggestive of influenza.
Queensland Health staff are available to screen passengers arriving on international flights at Brisbane, Cairns and Gold Coast airports.

Earlier this morning, a second confirmed case of H1N1 Influenza 09 was reported in the Northern Territory.

The breakdown is: ACT 4, NSW 70, SA 7, Qld 28, Tas 5, Vic 521, WA 2, NT 2

http://www.healthemergency.gov.au/i...ntent/health-swine_influenza-index.htm#4jun09

Happy said:

I don't think voluntary whatever does work in Australia.

Plastic bags in ocean, speed limit, cigarette butts and now home flu crap.

Does anybody believe that people do not take mask off and hop in a car to urgently do something somewhere?

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I just listened to an interview on ABC radio where the interviewer tried to get an answer out out the Qld. health minister as to what he could do if the parents and the kids ignored his quarantine. He rabbitted on about expecting responsible people do do the right thing.

Would these be the same responsible parents who allowed their children to wag school to go to Melbourne for a football game?

Vic just jumped by another 200+ cases on ch 10 news

Interesting situation at work today. Someone is travelling to Melbourne tomorrow and planned to be back at work next Wednesday. They asked me, in complete seriousness, whether they should return to work next week or should stay home because they will have just come back from Vic.

I don't know the "official" answer but I did think about it. One person going to Melbourne to watch football this weekend. Two others going to a concert in a fortnight. That's 3 people all travelling on planes and spending a lot of time surrounded by large numbers of people in very crowded locations in Vic.

In short, I concluded that the risk is significant for just this one workplace. Multiply that across the entire population and there's zero chance of preventing a mass outbreak unless virtually all passenger transport is completely shut down. That won't happen so the only sensible thing to do now is plan for a mass outbreak of swine flu.

I'm not normally into "end of the world is coming so buy tinned food and guns" type thinking but I'm stocking up on food just in case I end up in home isolation as I do think the risk seems real the way this is starting to spread.

I worked at a childcare centre a few days ago that had a child with a case of swine flu. They ask me if i wanted to work but i wasn't worried so i worked.

They didn't shut the centre down because it was only 1 child which only found out on the weekend so the health police said it was ok to keep open.

Well a few days after that the centre was shut down because 2 other kids got it. When they told me on the phone i found it amusing. No one has died and they make such a big deal of it.

If i did catch swine flu so sure it would spread quickly now because i worked in a centre near the docklands - when the rugby was on and when i came home was the time they were entering the stadium so i walked pass half the people entering the stadium. (although i feel fine and wasn't in contact with the children so i had nothing to worry about)

The health authorities say it is a good dummy run in case we ever get a serious pandemic. I think it is a comedy of errors. Read what Elizabeth Farrelly has to say;
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/pandemic-pandemonium-pass-the-paracetamol-20090603-bvmg.html

Julia said:

No, Spooly, it's not at all as valid today as it was in 1918. The main cause of death then was the bacterial infection (usually in the form of pneumonia) which followed the initial virus. There was no penicillin, so people died in large numbers.

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Hi Julia.
I would suggest a point of difference is that we have some native immunity to seasonal influenzas.
Swine flu now looks like it's beyond the point of containment.
It's known that we have not been exposed to this virus before and that it can be fatal in young people. Alarm bells.
This sets it apart, and the fact that history showed that millions died previously as a result of the Spanish flu (and it was the second wave that was deadly) tells us that they carry significant hazard potential not associated with the ordinary flu.
Granted that medicine has exponentially improved since 1920, but, it's all a about the numbers. If you get enough people sick, they'll overwhelm the system. People could die in large numbers. Thankfully it doesn't look that way.

And if you consider comparing swine flue to ordinary seasonal influenza is 'almost completely irrelevant', you are holding a different view from that of the country's Chief Medical Officer and most doctors

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I spent 4 days last week in hospital with the birth of my baby girl :bananasmi and they had a seasoned nurse on the door making sure everybody washed their hands at the entrance. I heard that people who coughed or sneezed were asked to leave, politely, and there was literally no access to the nursery.
I'm not sure who introduced this but I was delighted to see it.

aldebaran3003 said:

Here here!
Mexico pushed the red panic button too quickly, remembering the standard of living and health care. Now WHO and governments everywhere must try to save face and avoid a please-explain from business and the global public knowing that the threat and virulence is nowhere near the level it was first thought to be. WHO will have learned it's lesson in listening to academics from Mexico.

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Swine flu had an initial mortality rate of 6%. Seasonal flu is 0.1% and the Spanish flu was 2.5%. They had to act.

kincella said:

its just unbelievable that everyone who has swine virus lives in Vic....and not in the other states...
or is the testing equipment contaminated in the first place ????

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the reason most cases are in Vic is...because they're mexicans

I live in Melbourne and spend a lot of time in crowded areas. I'm not changing my behaviour at all. Over 600 confirmed cases and not one death? I'm not concerned.

Junior said:

I live in Melbourne and spend a lot of time in crowded areas. I'm not changing my behaviour at all. Over 600 confirmed cases and not one death? I'm not concerned.

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Is there even ONE person in hospital with this thing?

spooly74 said:

Hi Julia.
I would suggest a point of difference is that we have some native immunity to seasonal influenzas.

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It may be possible that older people do have some apparent immunity to swine flu in that it's so far affecting only younger people. No explanation for this so far.

I spent 4 days last week in hospital with the birth of my baby girl :bananasmi and they had a seasoned nurse on the door making sure everybody washed their hands at the entrance. I heard that people who coughed or sneezed were asked to leave, politely, and there was literally no access to the nursery.
I'm not sure who introduced this but I was delighted to see it.

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Congratulations on the birth of your daughter. A friend of mine had a baby a few weeks before the advent of the swine flu and although I don't know that anyone coughing or sneezing was asked to leave her room, similarly there was no access to the nursery so perhaps it's just pretty standard practice.

you will find the answer with google.....

It is likely similar results would hold for earlier H1N1 strains, at least post-1977, when H1N1 reappeared after an absence of 20 years to co-circulate with the H3N2 seasonal flu virus, but we don't know that yet. 47 million people were vaccinated with a swine flu vaccine in 1976. That strain was different, but it could conceivably be playing a part.

http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/05/swine_flu_why_are_older_people.php

that was one of the most interesting reads in a long time...look at these bits........

One suspicion is that the H1N1 that suddenly "came back" in 1977 was different from the H1N1 circulating before the H2N2 pandemic of 1957. The swine influenza virus of that era was originally from humans that jumped to pigs after the 1918 pandemic. It remains a mystery where the 1977 virus came from, but in 1978 Peter Palese's lab in New York discovered it was closely related to a Russian virus isolated in 1950. Vincent Racaniello, whose Virology Blog is always worth reading, picks up the story:

Influenza viruses of the H3N2 subtype were still circulating in humans in May of 1977 when H1N1 viruses were isolated in China and then Russia. In the winter of 1977-78 the H1N1 viruses caused epidemic infection throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The results of serological tests indicated that the HA and NA glycoproteins of the 1977 H1N1 viruses were very similar to those from viruses of the same subtype which circulated in 1950. Palese’s group compared viral RNA of one 1977 isolate, A/USSR/90/77, with RNA from a virus isolated in 1950. To their surprise, the two viral RNAs were highly related. In contrast, there was less similarity between viral RNAs from the 1977 H1N1 virus and H1N1 viruses that circulated in humans between 1947 and 1956.
Why were the viral genomes of the 1977 H1N1 isolate and the 1950 virus so similar? If the H1N1 viruses had been replicating in an animal host for 27 years, far more genetic differences would have been identified. The authors suggested several possibilities, but only one is compelling:

. . . it is possible that the 1950 H1N1 influenza virus was truly frozen in nature or elsewhere and that such a strain was only recently introduced into man.
The suggestion is clear: the virus was frozen in a laboratory freezer since 1950, and was released, either by intent or accident, in 1977. This possibility has been denied by Chinese and Russian scientists, but remains to this day the only scientifically plausible explanation.

[snip]

I was a Ph.D. student in Peter Palese’s laboratory when Katsuhisa Nakajima and Ulrich Desselberger did the work in 1978 that revealed the close identity of the H1N1 strains with isolates from 1950. It revealed to me, for the first time, how an important finding creates enormous excitement in the laboratory and in the scientific community, and how general interest is fueled by the press. (Vincent Racaniello, Virology Blog)


Red meat for the tin foil hat brigade, I know. I can't help that, although I am girding myself for the result. But even for the rest of us, a little mystery and intrigue goes a long way to spice up a dreary recital of all the things we don't know and can't predict. And it is an interesting question with possible practical consequences.

http://scienceblogs.com/mt/pings/110580

Comments

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'The reason for those over age 55 being relatively protected has nothing to do with their exposure to a influenza strain in the past that provides them with partial immunity.'

I agree Dr. Woodson...in part because there are way too many diseases that are confused with 'stomach flu' etc.

If influenza is a more sporadic disease and coupled with the viruses inherent ability to harness its genetic instability, then immunity isn't the answer.


I know that in other organisms, a particularly "fit" genotype/phenotype will stabilize, sometimes over long periods. Is it possible that the viral strain was a) well-suited to some reservoir that hadn't been recognized, and b) rarely was given an opportunity to jump to humans, so could "disappear" for long periods? Not likely, perhaps, but a possible alternative to being released from a lab...

hey maybe this swine flu was here all along we just didn't test for it before.
the count is now 874 in melb and rising that would be the only explanation as the more people we test the more we find them.:

We have had mild cases
Does that mean less people travelling to Melbourne : )

cough - cough

xyzedarteerf said:

hey maybe this swine flu was here all along we just didn't test for it before.

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Yes, agree totally with that!