According to CDC, swine flu cases went down last week. Have circumstances changed or is wave I ending?

170 deaths in the USA when 1% of the pandemic has passed (ignoring future vaccinations).

Three Tamiflu resistant infections have been reported from Denmark, Hong Kong and Japan.

Europe exceeded 10 000 cases. 4 deaths. The UK stopped counting of cases.

About 1/10000 of the pandemic has passed in the world (ignoring future vaccinations).

Cancun | July 3

BBC - The UN's top health official has opened a forum in Mexico on combating swine flu by saying that the spread of the virus worldwide is now unstoppable. World Health Organization head Margaret Chan added that the holding of the meeting in Cancun showed confidence in Mexico, which has been hard hit. The WHO says most H1N1 cases are mild, with many people recovering unaided. As the summit opened, the UK alone was projecting more than 100,000 new cases of H1N1 a day by the end of the summer, and informed the ECDC that the country has changed its response strategy, acknowledging that containment of the virus is no longer possible.

The disease, which the WHO declared a full-fledged pandemic on Jun. 11, is now spreading fast in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, fuelled by the southern hemisphere winter.

<sub>* The United States, with nearly 34,000 confirmed cases, remains the most affected country, followed by Mexico at about 9,000 and Canada with about 8,000 cases.
* 337 people have died from swine flu, which has also sickened 80000 others in 121 countries
* 1970's lab accident may have caused pandemic
* Obama to launch "national influenza campaign"
* WHO update 56 1/7</sub>

- With the total number of cases in the USA estimated to have passed a ballpark one million we can be re-assured that in its present makeup the swine flu has a very low fatality rate.

The UK is seeing numbers rise above 4,500, but the methodology of diagnosis and reporting is fluid across England and Scotland.

Sunshine, especially its ultra-violet properties, usually prevent the spread of influenza in summer as people are outside. However, it is obvious that the virus is continuing to spread. WHO's latest confirmed figure globally is approaching 60,000 as at June 26.

June 19

MSNBC - Worldwide, the number of confirmed cases reached 44,287, the WHO reported Friday. WHO says cases increased by more than 10 percent in two days. In Europe, the ECDC on Friday reported 348 new cases in EU and EFTA countries.

CDC tele-conference June 18.

In Australia the total of confirmed H1N1 Influenza 09 cases as at 1200 AEST on 20 June is at 2376, up 46 since this morning, with one H1N1 09 related death. The national breakdown is: ACT 93, NSW 409, NT 56, Qld 249, SA 139, Tas 62, Vic 1230, WA 138. One death has been recorded in SA in a person with confirmed H1N1 Influenza 09, together with a range of other chronic diseases.

Canberra | June 17

Agonist Exclusive - Over the next 48 hours Australia is moving into a new national pandemic level, "protect".
Following consultation with state and territory health officials and WHO, the consensus is that many Australians will contract the virus over the winter months. The new "protect" level is a solution on how to deal with a mild pandemic

Officials are hoping that the majority of cases will only have a mild influenza illness. Therefore the Australian health authorities have requested that anti-virals such as Tamiflu and Relenza are not to be prescribed to those with the illness, in order to maintain the stockpile of anti-virals. The stockpile is only to be used if a second more serious wave of infections occurs.

June 11

Agonist Exclusive - After years of international concern about an avian flu H5N1 pandemic; the world is awaiting the 6pm Geneva time WHO press conference, at the WHO boardroom where it is expected that the Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan will announce that the world is officially dealing with the novel H1N1 influenza (swine flu) at pandemic level. Scotland's Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon told Scottish lawmakers "A move to level 6 is not a verdict on the severity of the virus," she said. "It simply means that the extent of global spread now fulfills the definition of a pandemic." WHO considers a disease pandemic when transmission between humans becomes widespread in at least two regions of the world.

Emerging in Mexico and California in March 2009, the novel H1N1 influenza, commonly known as swine flu, has achieved what many feared Avian Flu would do since November 2003, spread rapidly 'around the world in 80 days', with sustained transmission on several continents, especially in Australia.

...And we have a pandemic! ~ h/t raja

June 9

WHO - situation update 45 as at June 8. Three updates a week have become the WHO norm~graham

My roundup of the current situation after the jump.

Spencer S. Hsu | June 8

WaPo - President Obama's contingency plan to help finance production of a swine flu vaccine with funds set aside to develop defenses against biological attacks would weaken the nation's preparedness for terrorism, the leaders of a bipartisan commission on weapons of mass destruction said yesterday.

The White House asked Congress on Tuesday for authority to spend up to $9 billion more for an H1N1 flu vaccine and other preparations against the novel flu strain that first appeared in April.

Of the total, the administration asked Congress to provide $2 billion in "contingent" funding. Another $3 billion could come from the Project BioShield Special Reserve Fund, created in 2004 to field countermeasures against nuclear, biological or chemical threats; $3.1 billion from stimulus funds appropriated to spur economic recovery; and $800 million from the Department of Health and Human Services.

"Using BioShield funds for flu preparedness will severely diminish the nation's efforts to prepare for WMD events and will leave the nation less, not more, prepared," the commission's chairman, former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), and vice chairman, former senator James M. Talent (R-Mo.), wrote to Obama in a letter sent yesterday and in another dated Wednesday to his budget director, Peter Orszag.

Raiding BioShield would weaken the ability of private firms to raise credit and sustain long-term research and development on drugs to respond to bioterror threats, for which there is no private market, industry officials said. The former lawmakers said the H1N1 influenza virus poses a public health threat that merits its own funding.

Google flu trends spies queries related to flu in almost real time from Australia, USA, Mexico and New Zealand.

The spread of the swine flu is normal in Australia. It spreads like an ordinary flu.

Whither novel h1n1 influenza (swine flu)?

Across the USA, it is the only significant influenza strain in circulation. Cases keep increasing thru Asia and Oceania.
Infections across Europe continue to rise BUT it is worth noting that some cases are actually travellers arriving from the Americas.

WHO continues to try and maintain a perspective by only posting updates every two days; with the onset of colder weather in the southern hemisphere, WHO is looking at implementing a severity index based on geographical data rather than upping the global pandemic warning to 6.

An interesting review of the response and preparedness of the USA since April here.

Earlier updates.

Jaonon Gale & John Lauerman | June 3

Bloomberg - Swine flu, becoming entrenched in Australia and Chile, will prompt the World Health Organization to declare the first influenza pandemic in 41 years, said three people familiar with the agency’s plans.

As global infections creep past 20,000, Bloomberg have a good round up of the current state of decision making~graham

It's got screaming panic inducing headlines down-under in Australia "Killer Flu". Plans to immunise half the population, government warnings on the radio and television. Tamiflu and Relenza buy-ups by the government. Cruise liner problems, footballers and the known infections double and triple daily over the past week, with dire warnings of an upsurge in cases over the coming weekend. Australians love of sport is also being posited as increasing the spread this weekend at sporting events. There's reports of the usual 3000 annual flu deaths tripling this year.

So is the panic overrated?

MIchael Slackman | Cairo | May 26

NYT - The garbage collectors of Cairo live in neighborhoods spilling over with trash. The children play with the trash and in the trash, when they are not helping to sort or collect the trash. The women sit right in the trash, picking out rotten food with their hands and tossing it to their pigs, which live right there in the neighborhood with them.

Slideshow

Really interesting article about the zabaleen and the slaughtering of pigs in Eygpt

- Australia's swine flu alert level has been raised from delay to contain, following the first case of human-to-human transmission confirmed at a school in Victoria.

Wapo - A substantial portion of older Americans may have some immunity to the swine-origin H1N1 influenza virus.

NYT - The Next Steps for Swine Flu: Predictions, Protection and Prevention.

Xinhua - Mexico City government announced early on Thursday its decision to drop the emergency state in the city, issued on April 23, as the number of deaths and confirmed cases of the A/H1N1 influenza has declined, with no new cases since May 14.

AP- UK's attempts to stop swine flu called flawed with experts deciding that the U.K.'s swine flu-fighting tactics are seriously off the mark and may be hiding a much larger outbreak.

Bloomberg - Japan has almost 300 cases of the virus since detecting its first infections two weeks ago. Virologist Hitoshi Oshitani said Japan, whose case total is the highest after the U.S., Mexico and Canada, could have diagnosed its first swine flu patients earlier if doctors had been looking closer for suspected cases in the community, not just in visitors from overseas.

WHO - update 36, previous threads here.

75% of those hospitalized because of swine flu in California were women and there was excess number of obese among hospitalized.

http://www.ajc.com/health/content/shared-auto/healthnews/cdc-/627257.html

Japanese cases jumped almost 100 today. A good try from the flu virus to start official pandemic but they wear masks there in Japan ...

Stephanie Nebehaym, Laura MacInnis, Mark Trevelyan | Geneva | May 15

Reuters - It is too early to relax about the H1N1 flu strain, the head of the World Health Organization said on Friday, calling it a crisis with possible global implications.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan cautioned that signs the outbreak was waning in its North American epicenter did not mean the worst was over, citing "great uncertainty" about whether that "partly reassuring picture" would be maintained.

"We are meeting at a time of crisis that could have global implications," she told an intergovernmental meeting on pandemic preparedness at the WHO's Geneva headquarters.

Keiji Fukuda, acting WHO assistant director-general, told the session that more than 7,520 people have been infected with the strain that is a mixture of swine, bird and human viruses. H1N1 flu has now killed 65 people in 34 countries, he said.

latest WHO updates, previous agonist stories here.

Mexico City/Prague | May 15

DPA - Mexico on Thursday was considering a request to the World Health Organization (WHO) for 'financial compensation' for countries that go public with epidemics to their own detriment.

'We are looking at the mechanisms that could emerge for international financial organs to bear this in mind, because in the end the country that does the right thing - that reports (the outbreak), that shares - that is the most affected country,' Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova Villalobos said.

Mexico has been at the centre of an influenza epidemic of the new A(H1N1) virus, with a confirmed death toll of 64 and a total of 2,656 confirmed infections.

'The damage to health and the financial damage for other countries would have been enormous' had not Mexico issued an early alert on April 23, when the presence of a new virus was confirmed and authorities adopted measures to combat the outbreak, Cordova Villalobos said.

He plans to raise the issue of compensation at next week's annual WHO assembly.

May 15

BBC - Bird flu may not have become the threat to humans that some predicted because our noses are too cold for the virus to thrive, UK researchers say.

An Imperial College London recreation of the nose's environment found that at 32 degrees Celsius, avian flu viruses lose function and cannot spread.

It is likely that the viruses have adapted to suit the warmer 40 degree environments in the guts of birds.

A mutation would be needed before bird flu became a human problem, they said.

Published in the journal PLoS Pathogens, the study also found that human viruses are affected by the colder temperatures found in the nose but to nowhere near the same extent.

Somebody and I wrote earlier that the deaths of small children because of influenza seem suspicious in the USA. Those figures continue to be slightly high still.

The latest CDC influenza report covering last week shows that there has been some odd flu epidemic during the last 3 weeks, which can't be explained by A(H1N1) alone. When the percentage of cases tested positive should have been falling because of more testing, the percentage has been increasing during these weeks. There might be another flu virus in circulation which would explain the excess of cases.

Because people are worried, there should have been more false alarms. Instead there have been more positive test results in percentages. This is the odd bit.

May 8

AP - A flu overreaction? Some say yes, but experts say no. The so-far mild swine flu outbreak has many people saying all the talk about a devastating global epidemic was just fearmongering hype. But that's not how public-health officials see it, calling complacency the thing that keeps them up at night. The World Health Organization added a scary-sounding warning yesterday, predicting that up to two billion people could catch the new flu if the outbreak goes global.

Two weeks after news broke about the new flu strain, there have been 48 deaths - 45 in Mexico, 2 in the United States and 1 in Canada. WHO in its latest bulletin reports 3,440 sick in 29 countries, including 1,639 confirmed U.S. cases a doubling of earlier figures, a jump that has been expected as a backlog of lab tests were confirmed ~graham - far lower than expected earlier. Canada, Spain and the United Kingdom have the most cases outside of Mexico and the United States.

The research now points back to cases in 2005, with CDC officials believing there may have been a gap in surveillance over the intervening years. The WHO have not decided to raise the pandemic scale from 5 to 6 because the virus is not spreading quickly outside of the US, but officials in the US are expecting it to reach all 50 states.

Japen confirms three cases. Australias' first case. Italy has first transmitted case. Seven confirmed cases in New Zealand.

previous threads here

A serious flu study found that in a really bad scenario there could be a desperate need to hospitalize some 10 million Americans. But exactly where could we put those stricken 10 million persons? Would there be enough hospital beds? How many hospital beds are there in the US? Make a guess.

Please read the rest of my article at:

http://searchwarp.com/swa473054-Fatal-Flu-Flaws.htm

Ben Harding | Madrid | May 4

Reuters - The World Health Organisation is likely to raise its alert for the new influenza strain to the highest level and declare a pandemic, its head indicated in an interview published on Monday. "Level six does not mean, in any way, that we are facing the end of the world. It is important to make this clear because (otherwise) when we announce level six it will cause an unnecessary panic," Margaret Chan, WHO Director General told Spanish newspaper El Pais.

"Flu viruses are very unpredictable, very deceptive...We should not be overconfident. One must not give H1N1 the opportunity to mix with other viruses. That is why we are on alert," she told the newspaper. Chan warned against over-confidence following a stabilisation in the number of new cases of H1N1 because the southern hemisphere was about to enter winter when flu cases naturally spike.

"We have to be very careful. No one can predict what is going to happen when countries in the south have flu peaks and this new one arrives -- which it is going to do, without a doubt.""It is true that the number (of cases in people who have not been to Mexico) is small but because of that I would say that we have not seen the full situation or the whole picture of what is happening. The situation is evolving and the virus is changing."

She said it was too early to predict what proportion of the population would catch the new influenza strain after the European Union predicted 40 percent of the population would become infected.

Please check comments for more articles

Catherine Bremer | Mexico City | May 1

Reuters - Mexico started a five-day shutdown of most offices and businesses on Friday to try to halt the spread of a deadly flu strain, and officials said they were encouraged by signs the number of new cases was dropping.

Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said the public hospitals that treat roughly half the country admitted 46 patients with severe flu symptoms on Thursday, down from 212 patients on April 20. "This is encouraging," he said.

Cordova said tests of samples sent to laboratories in the United States, Canada and Mexico had confirmed only 12 out of 176 deaths blamed on the H1N1 swine flu virus. "The number of confirmed fatalities will probably rise," he said.

Mark Silva | Washington | April 29

Scientists see this flu strain as relatively mild

Genetic data indicate this outbreak won't be as deadly as that of 1918, or even the average winter.

LA Times - As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.

"Let's not lose track of the fact that the normal seasonal influenza is a huge public health problem that kills tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands around the world," said Dr. Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine in Madison.

His remarks Wednesday came the same day Texas authorities announced that a nearly 2-year-old boy with the virus had died in a Houston hospital Monday.

"Any time someone dies, it's heartbreaking for their families and friends," Olsen said. "But we do need to keep this in perspective."

Flu viruses are known to be notoriously unpredictable, and this strain could mutate at any point -- becoming either more benign or dangerously severe. But mounting preliminary evidence from genetics labs, epidemiology models and simple mathematics suggests that the worst-case scenarios are likely to be avoided in the current outbreak.

"This virus doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to kill like the 1918 virus," which claimed an estimated 50 million victims worldwide, said Richard Webby, a leading influenza virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

WHO raises pandemic alert level to 5

The UN's World Health Organization has raised the alert over the spread of swine flu to level five - one short of a full-blown pandemic.

A phase five alert means human-to-human transmission in at least two countries. ~ BBC

LATEST: WHO chief says 'all of humanity' under threat if swine flu becomes a pandemic ~ BBC Ticker