Swine flu deaths re-estimated, triple

The U.S. Center for Disease Control has revised its estimates of deaths caused by swine flu, using a more accurate method.

The CDC has updated its swine flu estimates with calculations by epidemiologists. They take detailed records from 62 counties and extrapolate them to the country as a whole. These figures include deaths such as pneumonia caused by the flu. The previous figures counted only laboratory-confirmed cases or “pure” swine flu deaths caused by fever, respiratory distress, and drowning in one’s own lung secretions.

With the new estimates, the number of deaths in the U.S. attributed to swine flu has thus tripled to 3900 people, including 540 children. This is the same method used to count deaths from the usual seasonal flu.

The CDC estimated that:

* 8 million children up to age 17 were stricken by swine flu; 36,000 were hospitalized and 540 died.

* 12 million adults ages 18 to 64 were infected; 53,000 were hospitalized and 2,900 died.

* 2 million people 65 or older were infected; 9,000 were hospitalized and 440 died. In a normal flu season, 90% of deaths occur in those over 65.

The new estimates do not include infections and deaths since Oct. 17, a period in which swine flu has been circulating at its highest rate.

The new plague rats

That’s not what Amy Wallace calls them, it’s what I call them. Parents who don’t vaccinate their children, to avoid the one-in-two-million chance of dangerous reactions, are bringing back the old childhood killers.

Amy Wallace wrote:

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.

They are also endangering those too young to immunize, those with compromised immune systems such as transplant recipients and older people whose immune response to vaccines drops as they age.

Read An Epidemic of Fear by Amy Wallace.

Anthrax and anthrax vaccination

Anthrax is a soil bacterium that produces a disease deadly to animals. A herd of cattle exposed to anthrax is usually slaughtered to keep it from spreading. Anthrax spores can live in the soil for up to fifty years.

The most common form in humans is cutaneous anthrax, where the bacterium enters through a break in the skin.

Cutaneous (skin) anthrax

NIH says:

During an infection, an initial skin lesion forms then blisters. The blister breaks down into a black ulcer and nearby lymph nodes may become infected and painful. A scar is often formed which then dries and falls off within two weeks. In 20% of untreated individuals, the infection may spread to the bloodstream and become fatal.

Antibiotics are a big help in controlling and curing anthrax.

It has been said that no controlled, double-blind studies have been done of various vaccines. But there are still results. Here’s the entry for anthrax vaccine, from the UK Department of Health’s ’s Green Book:

The vaccine is made from antigens found in the sterile filtrate from cultures of the Sterne strain of B. anthracis. These antigens are adsorbed onto an aluminium adjuvant to improve their immunogenicity and are preserved with thiomersal. The vaccine is inactivated, does not contain live organisms and cannot cause the disease against which it protects.

There have been no formal efficacy trials with the UK vaccine. In 1958, the introduction of vaccine successfully controlled cutaneous anthrax at a government wool-disinfecting station in Liverpool (Hambleton et al., 1984). A controlled clinical trial was carried out in the 1950s among workers in goat-hair mills in New Hampshire, USA, using a vaccine similar to that currently licensed in the USA and the UK (Brachman et al., 1962). Although the study did not have sufficient power to accurately measure protection against pulmonary anthrax, no cases occurred in the vaccinated group compared with five in the unvaccinated.

There have been no recorded cases of anthrax infection in individuals vaccinated in the UK.

(Anthrax, PDF file)

Must health workers be immunized against swine flu?

Swine flu virus (CDC image)

A judge in New York state has just issued a temporary restraining order against the state health commission(er), who ordered that all state health workers get the swine flu vaccine or risk being fined. Three nurses claimed that their employer was violating their civil rights.

I guess they have a right in their jobs to endanger others by spreading disease, do they? Don’t they have a duty to deliver healthcare if they want to stay employed? Bitch, bitch bitch…

Here’s the article: New York Judge Blocks mandated swine flu shots” or nasal spray, as the case may be.

Mexican swine flu hits hard

A the new strain of H1N1 flu, but not the only H1N1 in circulation, is hitting young, healthy people hard according to the Globe & Mail: “Younger Women Hit Hard by H1N1 virus, study suggests.” The article first says that 1% need intensive care; but then reports that 20% are hospitalized and 4% are moved to an Intensive Care Unit.

• The vast majority of victims are sick for a week or so and then recover, but some need intensive care in hospital
• Of that 1%, 67% are younger, healthy women and 30% are children. That means only 3% are old people or younger, healthy men.
• One in six (17%) of those admitted to intensive care died–and of that 17%, 72% were women. That means women had a higher chance of dying than other patients with the same condition.
• In seasonal flu, almost all the victims who die are over 65 years old. But the average age of the women who died was 42. Older people seem to be protected by their exposure to older strains of the flu.

The article says:

According to the study, 81 per cent of H1N1 patients in ICU had to be placed on a ventilator, 14 per cent received inhaled nitric oxide (a rare treatment used for those in severe respiratory distress) and 4 per cent were so ill that they were placed on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO, a machine that usually substitutes for the heart and lungs during heart surgery).

According to the research, of the first 7,107 reported cases of H1N1 in Canada, 1,441 required hospitalization (20.3 per cent) and 278 were admitted to ICU (3.9 per cent).

Of those admitted to intensive care, 67.3 per cent were female and 29.8 per cent were children. The average age of those in ICU was 32. Another notable statistic is that 25.6 per cent of those who fell gravely ill were aboriginal.