Health officials concerned about swine flu outbreak

[Docfeelgood]

That is news to me about the swine sequences.
let me check out your link

[Docfeelgood]

What is the validity of the information of this poster?
Has anything official been said?
I understand the viral subtypes but the genome is greek to me.

[Q Classic]

If you click on "About":
In epidemiology an effect is the endpoint of a causal mechanism. An effect measure is an estimate of the influence of a particular factor on a population's health. The Editors of Effect Measure are senior public health scientists and practitioners. Their names would be immediately recognizable to many in the public health community. They prefer to keep their online and public lives separate to allow maximum freedom of expression. Paul Revere was a member of the first local Board of Health in the United States (Boston, 1799). The Editors sign their posts "Revere" to recognize the public service of a professional forerunner better known for other things.

The source of the comment on it being just swine sequences being found:
That link by this guy

Raul Rabadan, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
1130 St. Nicholas Ave
ICRC Bldg 8th Floor, Office 803B
New York, NY 10032
rabadan@dbmi.columbia.edu

It's just a few clicks, you realize. If you want to verify it further, you're more than welcome to; but I've yet to find anybody who runs a blog at ScienceBlogs.com to willfully perpetrate mistruths.

[Docfeelgood]

It's just a few clicks, you realize. If you want to verify it further, you're more than welcome to; but I've yet to find anybody who runs a blog at ScienceBlogs.com to willfully perpetrate mistruths.[/QUOTE]

I'll take your word

[Docfeelgood]

What's the take home message? We should stop fixating on hourly changes in numbers or differences about the sequences and keep our eye on the Big Picture. Right now that picture is still cloudy, but will be coming into sharper focus as new information accrues and is organized. Generally, though, we have a novel virus (in the sense that the human population is immunologically naive to it) that is spreading person to person and seems to have clinical characteristics not unlike usual seasonal influenza. Because of its novelty the number of people it could make sick is potentially far greater than a seasonal virus, however, since there is no naturally acquired immunity we know of at the moment (it may turn out there is some cross reactivity with some other strain from years past but so far we have no evidence of that).

As a Big Picture, it's not the most comforting, whatever the day to day numbers

Is he saying BETTER the same thing I have been saying?

[Q Classic]

Uh, you haven't really been saying that. Your posts have distinctly given the impression that we should be far more worried than the country's current somewhat-panicky state.

He's saying what I've been saying, in that this is something to keep an eye on, but nothing to really panic over until we get a better picture.

[Docfeelgood]

Uh, you haven't really been saying that. Your posts have distinctly given the impression that we should be far more worried than the country's current somewhat-panicky state.

He's saying what I've been saying, in that this is something to keep an eye on, but nothing to really panic over until we get a better picture.

Did you read my post?

[Docfeelgood]

As the virus spreads it mutates over time.
Like AIDS it may start out more lethal at first then mutate to a less lethal strain.
Or vise versa.

As I have been trying to say this first wave may not be the one to fear.
It may be the next wave that we will have to fear because of the mutation.

This could be just the start of a lethal strain.

Human + swine + bird is a new strain never seen before.
Lets all hope for the best

[Docfeelgood]

Just got the news phase 5.

[Q Classic]

Did you read my post?

Yes.

Post 19:
You give to this: "I work as a resident doctor in one of the biggest hospitals in Mexico City and sadly, the situation is far from “under control”."

Posts 36 and 37:
Written in enormous font, with sensationalistic headlines: "US declares public health emergency for swine flu!!", for example.

Post 44:
"I'm going to go on record here and state this is either mass hysteria or a biological weapon attack."
If it's the former, your earlier posts do nothing to calm it; if it's the latter, your earlier posts only serve to muddy the waters.

Starting with post 121, you begin to say, "If it's not this one, it's going to be the next one!", which again, isn't actually helping, but rather exacerbating, the type of panic and fear that accompanies these sorts of things.

My apologies if that's not what you're actually intending to convey, but that is what you are conveying--which is something markedly different from what the post at Effect Measure on ScienceBlogs is doing.

[Docfeelgood]

"It's a virus that we've never seen before," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

[Docfeelgood]

Yes.

Post 19:
You give to this: "I work as a resident doctor in one of the biggest hospitals in Mexico City and sadly, the situation is far from “under control”."

Posts 36 and 37:
Written in enormous font, with sensationalistic headlines: "US declares public health emergency for swine flu!!", for example.

Post 44:
"I'm going to go on record here and state this is either mass hysteria or a biological weapon attack."
If it's the former, your earlier posts do nothing to calm it; if it's the latter, your earlier posts only serve to muddy the waters.

Starting with post 121, you begin to say, "If it's not this one, it's going to be the next one!", which again, isn't actually helping, but rather exacerbating, the type of panic and fear that accompanies these sorts of things.

My apologies if that's not what you're actually intending to convey, but that is what you are conveying--which is something markedly different from what the post at Effect Measure on ScienceBlogs is doing.

Truth hurts.

You want to to sugar coat or tell the truth?
At least I know I'm right.

[Theben]

Unfortunately, it also raises some questions: the deaths in Mexico were predominantly in healthy adults; it's been suggested that those deaths are similar to the 1919 Spanish flu, in that the actual mechanism that killed them was a cytokine storm.

Interesting tidbit I came across today:

Iron can also increase disease risk by functioning as a readily available essential nutrient for invading microbial and neoplastic cells. To survive and replicate in hosts, microbial pathogens must acquire host iron. Highly virulent strains possess exceptionally powerful mechanisms for obtaining host iron from healthy hosts (7). In persons whose tissues and cells contain excessive iron, pathogens can much more readily procure iron from molecules of transferrin that are elevated in iron saturation. In such cases, even microbial strains that are not ordinarily dangerous can cause illness. Markedly invasive neoplastic cell strains can glean host iron more easily than less malignant strains or normal host cells (3). Moreover, iron-loaded tissues are especially susceptible to growth of malignant cells (Table 1).

In the past, healthy adult men were at greater risk than anyone else- children and the elderly tended to be malnourished, with corresponding iron deficiencies, and adult women are regularly iron-depleted by menstruation, pregnancy, and breast-feeding...A study of plague in St. Botolph's Parish in 1625 indicates that men between 15 and 44 killed by the disease outnumbered women of the same age by a factor of 2 to 1.

So lay off the steak and iron supplements for a while.

[KrazyHorse]

Every ****ing flu season has a virus we've never seen before.



Come on now. I hardly know ANYTHING about microbiology but even I can tell when somebody's talking out of their ass.

You have ABSOLUTELY no sense of proportion. As always, your posts have been sensationalist and ignorant.

[Q Classic]

What truth are you speaking of? That we should all panic and stress ourselves over this and maybe the next and maybe the next and maybe the next flu?

Or the truth that goes along the lines of: "Yes, this could be a problem. Let's drop the hysterics and focus our rationality on solving this problem and improve our response times for any future outbreaks."

You're doing the first. And yes, we should be concerned about the future strains and mutations. But your type of sensationalism only makes people panic more, makes them more scared, causing jitters and stress that prevents a more reasoned look at the situation and weakens people's immune systems.

Effect Measure and I are strong proponents of the latter--a reasoned, rational, methodical approach.