Influenza A (H1N1)

Swine flu cases top 1,000
By: AFP
Published: 4/05/2009 at 11:56 PM

The number of swine flu victims topped the 1,000 mark on Monday as the UN's most senior health official warned that a second wave of the virus could be far worse.

As Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak, prepared for the reopening of restaurants and businesses shuttered by the A (H1N1) virus, the number of affected countries climbed once again.

Mexico raised its confirmed swine flu toll to 26 deaths on Monday, but said the epidemic appeared to be slowing. The previous toll, given late Sunday, was 22 dead and 568 infected.

The sense of alarm however grew in Britain when it emerged that another seven people who had not been to Mexico had the virus.

World Health Organization chief Margaret Chan told UN officials in New York that despite the continued spread it was not yet time to declare a pandemic.

"There are now 1,003 confirmed cases of H1N1 in 20 countries. We don't know how long we have till we move to phase six. Six indicates we are in a pandemic. We are not there yet."

Mexican President Felipe Calderon said the epidemic, which has left the tourism industry on its knees, had been contained as officials pledged to re-open businesses this week and get the country up and running again.

"We have been able to hold or at least reduce the rate of propagation of the virus to contain the epidemic," he said.

Authorities in Mexico City said restaurants would reopen on Wednesday and museums and religious centres the following day. Nightclubs, cinemas and theatres would remain closed until further notice.

Experts, however, cautioned the virus was far from defeated and could yet return with "a vengeance".

Chan said the end of the flu season in the northern hemisphere meant that while any initial outbreak could be milder, a second wave could be more lethal, reflecting a pattern seen with the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed up to 50 million people.

Its re-emergence "would be the biggest of all outbreaks the world has faced in the 21st century", she told the Financial Times.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon echoed appeals for caution, saying at the UN talks: "There is still much that is not known about this new strain and the dangers it poses.

"We should not allow intense media coverage to alarm us. At the same time, we should avoid a false sense of security if such coverage declines.

"In the face of uncertainty, we must be vigilant."

Such vigilance was in evidence in Britain, where health officials announced nine new cases, including seven people who had not travelled to Mexico.

A school attended by five of the victims in Dulwich, London, became the fourth in Britain to be closed to prevent more infections.

Diplomatic damage from the epidemic also reverberated with China denying it had discriminated against Mexican nationals after dozens were placed under quarantine over the weekend despite showing no signs of the flu.

More countries are confirming cases every day with Portugal the latest to join the list, while France announced two new confirmed cases as did Italy, doubling its previous caseload.

Japan tripled the number of quarantine officers at Tokyo's Narita airport to try to detect cases at the start of a holiday week.

In the United States, the only other country to have recorded a death from the virus, officials said 36 of the 50 states had now confirmed cases.

US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius agreed the real test would come when the winter flu season hits.

"Even if this current situation seems to be lessening, if we are cautiously optimistic, we really don't know what's going to happen when real flu season hits (together) with H1N1 virus," she told CBS television.

In China, centre of the 2003 SARS outbreak, authorities have been accused of discriminating against Mexicans in a bid to keep out the virus.

Although no case of swine flu has been reported on mainland China, one Mexican who stayed in a hotel in Hong Kong has tested positive.

A Mexican embassy official in Beijing said nearly 70 Mexicans had been quarantined across China including in Beijing, Shanghai and the southern city of Guangzhou even though they had no flu symptoms.

Some 250 recruits and personnel at an army camp in the western Swiss canton of Fribourg were also placed under quarantine after two recruits were suspected of contracting the virus.

Egypt pushed ahead with a mass slaughter of the country's quarter of a million pigs, a day after clashes erupted with protesting pig farmers.

Source: http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/world/142357/swine-flu-cases-top-1000-who

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W.H.O. Gives Virus a Name That’s More Scientific and Less Loaded

By: DENISE GRADY
Published: April 30, 2009

On Wednesday, the new disease affecting thousands of people in Mexico and more than 100 in the United States and other countries was called swine influenza. By Thursday, the “S word” had been banned: A sentence in a box at the very top of the home page of the World Health Organization said, “From today, W.H.O. will refer to the new influenza virus as influenza A(H1N1).”

At the organization’s news conference in Geneva on Thursday, its deputy director general, Dr. Keiji Fukuda, dutifully referred to the virus as “H1N1,” slipping only once. Just two days earlier, Dr. Fukuda had declared that the new virus was a swine influenza virus and that the organization had no plans to call it anything other than what it was.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have also started to shun the word “swine,” and a hapless reporter who used it during a radio interview was roundly scolded by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The name may have changed, but the virus has not. Scientists who have examined its genetic material say that most of it comes from viruses known to infect pigs. But for various reasons, it seems, that is better left unsaid.

“There were some issues regarding the name ‘swine flu’ that were brought to the attention of the scientific community,” said Thomas W. Skinner, a spokesman for the C.D.C. “Sensitive issues in other parts of the world. Among the issues were cultural ones.”

And in the United States, Mr. Skinner said, “I think there were issues around the use of the name and its impact on commerce.”

Fiona Fleck, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization, said that the virus was originally called swine flu “because the largest component of this new virus was actually swine flu virus.”

But she added: “It doesn’t affect pigs, as far as we know. It hasn’t been found in pigs. Pigs haven’t transmitted it, as far as we know.” She said that the research had not yet been done to confirm that.

More important, Ms. Fleck said, the name “swine flu” has led some people, mistakenly, to become fearful about eating pork, and that has had an adverse impact on the livelihoods of those in the pork industry.

“So the naming is very fraught, of course,” she said. “It’s fairness, and of course we’re a scientific organization. A(H1N1) is a scientific name. That’s it. But the scientific name is not very user friendly. I think it would help all of us if we could find a name that’s easier to say that’s more popular.”

Maybe, she suggested, there could be a competition, and members of the public could come up with a better name.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/health/01name.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=swine%20flu&st=cse

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Pork Industry Fights Concerns Over Swine Flu
By ANDREW MARTIN and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
Published: April 29, 2009

The swine flu is producing global hesitation over eating pork.

As more cases of the new influenza emerged on Tuesday, deepening worries about a possible pandemic, several nations slammed their borders shut to pork from the United States and Mexico. Wall Street analysts predicted a sharp decline of pork sales in grocery stores, and some consumers began steering clear of pork chops.

The pork industry reacted with frustration. Medical authorities say that people cannot contract the swine flu from eating properly cooked pork. There is no evidence so far that the people who are becoming sick were in contact with pigs. In fact, authorities are not even sure how susceptible pigs are to infection with the new flu.

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, convened a hearing on Tuesday on a subject he described as “the so-called swine flu,” even as a campaign was mounted by farm groups to rename the virus “North American influenza.”

“Swine flu is a misnomer,” said C. Larry Pope, the chief executive of Smithfield Foods, who said he feared panic among consumers. “They need to be concerned about influenza, but not eating pork.”

Researchers say that based on its genetic structure, the new virus is without question a type of swine influenza, derived originally from a strain that lived in pigs. But the experts are still sorting out how long ago it infected pigs and how much it might have mutated when it jumped to humans.

“It’s fair to say that at some point the virus passed through a pig,” said Dr. Paul A. Offit, an infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “It could have been months; it could have been years ago.”

Even if pigs were the original source of the disease, experts said they did not appear to be playing any role in its transmission now. The virus is passing from person to person, they said, most likely by the spread of respiratory droplets.

The assurances from medical authorities have not forestalled a pork panic.

Several countries on Tuesday announced that they were banning some or all pork products from the United States, angering trade negotiators and hog farmers. To date, countries including the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Ecuador have banned pork from the United States, with Mexican pork exports also covered by most of those bans.
China banned pork from certain states, and Russia banned all meat imports, not just pork, from certain states.

Trade officials said it was not uncommon for countries to impose trade restrictions upon news of an outbreak, either as an emotional response to appease consumers or a convenient excuse to impose a trade barrier. For instance, South Korea banned American beef for five years because of fears of mad cow disease.

The challenge, the officials say, is persuading those countries to reverse the restrictions so they do not become permanent.

“If you don’t reverse bad policy quickly, people get used to it,” said Allen F. Johnson, a former chief agriculture trade negotiator for the United States trade representative and now a consultant.

On Tuesday, the Obama administration’s chief trade representative, Ron Kirk, urged trading partners to base their decisions on science and international trade obligations, and he suggested that bans on American pork “may result in serious trade disruptions without cause.”

Some hog producers were furious at the trade bans, saying they were simply a political ploy by countries to give their own farmers a leg up. “We are in a very economically stressed economy, and anything a country can do to discredit another country’s product, they will do that for trade advantage,” said Scott Burroughs, the chief operating officer at Nebraska Pork Partners.

While it may be too soon to know how the swine flu outbreak will affect pork sales, early indications are mixed. Pork sales at Wal-Mart are down by high single digits, a spokeswoman said. However, pork sales have remained constant at Publix, a grocery chain based in Florida.

At a grocery store in downtown Houston, Gina Tran, a homemaker, said she usually bought pork but had stopped because of safety concerns.

“People in Mexico ate some pork and got sick, right?” said Ms. Tran, who was looking for selections in the beef case. (That is not what happened, as far as anyone knows.)

Yvonne Enard, a retired warehouse worker, said she too believed there was a connection between pork and swine flu but figured it would be safe to eat anyway. “I’ll buy it, but I wouldn’t buy it from just any store, and I would season it and cook it very well,” she said.

Source: http://www.timesdaily.com/article/20090429/ZNYT03/904293017?Title=Pork-Industry-Fights-Concerns-Over-Swine-Flu

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The red letters: The number of the Swine flu’s victims
The Green letters: The propagation of the Swine flu
The Blue letters: The changing name from the Swine flu to influenza A (H1N1)
The Orange letters: The banning pork from each country

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Conclusion

The 2009 influenza which is the Swine flu originated from Mexico, and now it widely spread out through the world. Because of the Swine flu, over thousands of people in 20 counties are confirmed as the patients and 26 Mexicans have already died by the Swine flu.

The crucial flu can easily passed from person to person. The most common method of the Swine flu‘s transmission is inflecting through the air, and it is also possible to become infected by touching a surface with the virus on it and then touching mouth or nose. Thus, many countries try to reduce the propagation rate of the virus by closing the community or confine the suspected person of the swine flu for seven day to check the symptom.

The word “Swine flu” made a lot of people misunderstands about the new influenza. They think if they eat pork, they will get sick so many countries banned pork product so the pork industry turndown. But actually the Swine flu will only inflect from person to person. People will not inflect the new influenza from eating properly cooked pork or touching the pig.

So World Health Organization (W.H.O.) avoids using the word “swine flu”, they will use the word influenza A (H1N1) instead. But the word “influenza A (H1N1)” is not popular because it is the technical term for the scientist so the general people may not understand.

Reaction

Although the Swine flu is not spread to Thailand yet, but we should be awareness at all the times because it already spread to Hong Kong and South Korea that means it is possible to spread to Thailand one day.

- There was no evidence that the virus was transmitted from pigs to person so we can regularly consume pork meat. The virus will transmit from person to person only.

- We should wash our hands frequently with soap or hand sanitizer gel to sanitize the virus because we can inflect the swine flu when the virus contact with the nose or mouth.

- Keep the hands away from nose or mouth after we touched something that has been inflected.

- We can prevent transmission of virus around the house by cleaning hard surfaces, including doorknobs, refrigerator handles, faucets and telephones with the alcohol.

- Avoid contacting with the person who has been ill because the virus can easily inflect person to person.

- Avoid being in the crowded places because the virus easily passes through the air

- Not only people that concern about the spread of Swine flu, but the government also concerns it too. They think about preventive measure that prevents the Swine flu spreading to Thailand by ordering the heat detecting machines and install them at the gateway. It was for the travelers from the suspected counties in order to prevent the Swine flu to spread in Thailand.