Swine flu may be on the wane
If you’ve made it this far, chances are better you won’t be getting the swine flu. The fall wave has peaked, experts seem to agree, and while there will surely be more cases to come, they are on the wane. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning that another (winter) wave may occur in January, possibly prompted by students returning home from college during the Christmas holidays, but thus far, the flu pandemic has been a relative non-event as flu pandemics go.
So far, pandemic H1N1 is still crowding out other influenzas, such as seasonal H1N1 and H3N2. Since September, the CDC has tested 420 patient samples that were positive for influenza, and of those, only eight were not pandemic H1N1. Indeed, only one was seasonal H1N1.
The dominance of pandemic flu has not been good for the youngest age groups, however. During week 46 of 2009 (the last for which CDC figures have been reported) 35 influenza-related pediatric deaths were reported. Twenty-seven of these deaths were associated with pandemic H1N1 infections, seven were due to an undetermined influenza A virus subtype, and one was associated with a seasonal H1N1 infection that occurred in March.
Clearly pandemic H1N1 has been harder on children and teenagers than on older people. The H3N2 virus, on the other hand, tends to kill the elderly. But only three cases of H3N2 were reported out of the 420 patient samples previously mentioned, meaning that the pandemic flu’s tendency to crowd out other strains has spared the older age groups, relatively speaking.
Since April, the H1N1 outbreak has killed about 4,000 Americans, according to CDC estimates, of which at least 230 were children under the age of 18.
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