I've been ill this week with body aches and other problems. Of course, hypochondriac that I am, I worried that I have swine flu. I've heard that it can be very mild. Then this morning I noticed I didn't have fever. That made my husband and me conclude that I couldn't have flu without a fever. But then I read this. I'm posting it so you'll know in case you feel ill and worry that it's swine flu:
"Many people suffering from swine influenza, even those who are severely ill, do not have fever, an odd feature of the new virus that could increase the difficulty of controlling the epidemic, said a leading American infectious-disease expert who examined cases in Mexico last week.
Fever is a hallmark of influenza, often rising abruptly to 104 degrees at the onset of illness. Because many infectious-disease experts consider fever the most important sign of the disease, the presence of fever is a critical part of screening patients.
But about a third of the patients at two hospitals in Mexico City where the American expert, Dr. Richard P. Wenzel, consulted for four days last week had no fever when screened, he said.
“It surprised me and my Mexican colleagues, because the textbooks say that in an influenza outbreak the predictive value of fever and cough is 90 percent,” Dr. Wenzel said by telephone from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he is chairman of the department of internal medicine."
from the New York Times
4 comments:
If you have the swine flu, can I catch it from this blog?
I hate to think that anyone would get sick from reading this blog!
I called the Swine Flu Hotline and I think I must just have a bug, not swine flu, so Casey Ann, you are safe to continue reading....
Between 250,000 and 500,000 people die each year from the regular flu according to the CDC. Most of these people are over 65 (90%).
Less than 500 people have died from H1N1 since the panic began. It sort of makes one wonder what all the hype is about.
I asked the same thing. There are two reasons:
1) When it was first reported in Mexico, it had an apparently high mortality rate, causing an initial panic. Once the media got hold of it, it became a celebrity disease, so all of its movements have been reported ever since.
2) The new strain is a result of genome shift rather than genome drift (according to my medical correspondent). In other words, it's a completely new strain rather than one which has evolved from a virus already in circulation. There was apparently a similar strain around in the 1950s, which means some older people have some immunity.
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