WASHINGTON — The alarm sounded with two sneezy children in California in April. Just five months later, the never-before-seen swine flu has become the world’s dominant strain of influenza, and it’s putting a shockingly younger face on flu.
So get ready. With flu’s favorite weather fast approaching, we’re going to be a sick nation this fall. The big unknown is how sick. One in five people infected or a worst case — half the population? The usual 36,000 deaths from flu or tens of thousands more?
The World Health Organization predicts that within two years, nearly one-third of the world’s population will have caught it.
“What we know is, it’s brand new and no one really has an immunity to this disease,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said.
A lot depends on whether the swine flu that simmered all summer erupts immediately as students crowd back into schools and colleges — or holds off until millions of vaccine doses start arriving in mid-October.
Only this week do U.S. researchers start blood tests to answer a critical question: How many doses of swine flu vaccine does it take to protect? The answer will determine whether many people need to line up for two flu shots — one against swine flu and one against the regular flu — or three.
The hopeful news: Even with no vaccine, winter is ending in the Southern Hemisphere without as much havoc as doctors had feared, a heavy season that started early but not an overwhelming one. The strain that doctors call the 2009 H1N1 flu isn’t any deadlier than typical winter flu so far. Most people recover without treatment; many become only mildly ill.
Importantly, careful genetic tracking shows no sign yet that the virus is mutating into a harsher strain.
Worldwide, swine flu is killing mostly people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, ages when influenza usually is shrugged off as a nuisance.
Risk for children
Children are flu’s prime spreaders. Already, elementary schools and colleges are reporting small clusters of sick students. For parents, the big fear is how many children will die.
In the U.S., regular flu kills 80 to 100 children every winter, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reports of about three dozen child deaths from swine flu.
Even if the risk of death is no higher than in a normal year, the sheer volume of ill youngsters means “a greater than expected number of deaths in children is likely,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
Schools around the U.S. are preparing to inoculate children in what could be the largest campus vaccinations since the days of polio. The government has bought 195 million doses and will ship them a bit at a time, starting with 45 million doses or so in October, to state health departments to dispense.
Wash your hands, sneeze into the inside of your elbow, stay home so you don’t spread illness when you’re sick. That’s the mantra until vaccine arrives.
Symptoms
Symptoms of any flu include fever of 100 degrees or more, cough, body chills and aches, congestion. Diarrhea and vomiting sometimes occur, particularly with swine flu.
But not everyone with swine flu gets a fever, making it hard to know if they’ve got that or a common cold.
Emergency care
Signs to seek emergency care include shortness of breath, chest pain or pressure, confusion or seizures, persistent vomiting or inability to hold down liquids, and bluish lips.
The over-65 catch
At higher risk from any kind of flu are pregnant women; people of any age with heart disease, asthma, diabetes and neuromuscular diseases including muscular dystrophy; children under 2; people over 65. Some countries report more deaths among the obese.
While the over-65 tend not to catch swine flu, they are prime targets of the regular winter flu — and there’s no way for patients to tell the two apart.
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