Colette Meiji

(its wikipedia Jesse follow the "properties" )

HOWEVER .. wikipedia isn't really a good source per se.

On the contrary I have heard several sources mention this about limited immunity for people under a certain age ..

Here is one ..

Debate Over H1N1 Vaccine? There Shouldn't Be One : NPR



(more people should listen to NPR, they actually have real journalists that real experts participate with)

Colette Meiji

What You Need To Know About Swine Flu Vaccine : NPR

Arilynn

The CDC talks about this as well its in H1N1 info:

Gigs

It's not wikipedia, it's this:

The various strains of influenza that have infected the human population in the 20th century. Data taken from figure 2 of Palese P (December 2004). "Influenza: old and new threats". Nat. Med. 10 (12 Suppl): S82–7. DOI:10.1038/nm1141. PMID 15577936.

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Jesse Barnett

Thank you Gigs. Using that I was able to find the whole article.

Now back to H1N1, I really need to try again. Actually I muddied the water some earlier and it's probably better to start again.

Disregard the H's, N's, A's & B's for now.

Every year there are flu outbreaks.

Many years in a century there are even flu epidemics.

There are only a handful of pandemics in a century. This year we are experiencing the first pandemic of this century. Last century we had 3 pandemics, Spanish, Asian & Hong Kong, along with a couple of near pandemics. Although some are now saying that 1977's Russia's FU that Collette mentioned was another pandemic.

We are now in the first pandemic of this century.

A flu pandemic occurs when a new influenza A virus emerges for which there is little or no immunity in the human population.

Type A's mutate constantly but sometimes they take an evolutionary leap. This is what happened in 1957 with the Hong Kong flu. That was the first time that an H1N1 evolved into an H1N2.

In one of the abstracts I gave in my big post there was this snippet:

"However, there are significant changes in both the hemagglutinin and neuraminidase proteins of the new virus, 27.2% and 18.2% of the amino acid sequence, from prior H1N1 isolates in 2008 and the current vaccine. Such a degree of change qualifies as an "antigenic shift", even while the virus remains in the H1N1 family of influenza viruses, and may give influenza H1N1 2009 significant pandemic potential."

So this time, although it is still an H1N1, it made another evolutionary "leap", enough so that a significant portion of the population has no antibodies against it. We are damned lucky that it is not a particularly nasty flu, although it will continue to mutate and might become worse. But even being mild we are still in a pandemic because so many people are getting sick. We are just in the start of the flu season and are already way above the normal peak incidence levels and we are still below the numbers Canada is seeing now.

A few states already reporting 10,000+ cases per week when the normal seasonal peak is 1,000 to 2,000. This is going to be the biggest problem now, this incredible strain on our health care system. This strain is only going to get much worse in the next few months.

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Fmeh

Meh, I started getting a flu on Thursday, I've been in bed the last couple days for most of the day and night... headache, nasty respiratory symptoms, stuffed nose, fever, burning skin, dizzy, lovely stuff.

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mcgeeb Gupte

I'm not sure but is it possible to not get the H1N1 virus even though many people including my kids have had it? Or did the doctor just assume they had it? They were never actually tested. Same thing with people at work. They say they had it, but were never tested for it. The longest I've felt sick this fall is half a day and it wasn't that bad at all.

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Desmond Shang

I had clearly flu like symptoms in early October (fast onset, aches, fever, deep in the lungs but no sinus issues) but it was relatively mild... I thought: no big deal.

Then it hit hard. I think most of the badness was a secondary infection; bronchitis for weeks. It's just about gone but I have not been this sick in years.

And that extreme fatigue factor hit me too. Normally 8 hours of sleep is plenty and 9 is just me being luxuriously lazy... this had me down for 12 or 14 at times, and feeling really bleah when awake. It's still not entirely gone.

* * * * *

For anyone who has any idea of what happened in 1918, this flu should scare the crap out of you.

It's like earthquakes. An incredibly deadly flu is coming sooner or later; it may not be this particular one but it *will* come.

This is the one natural disaster that you hear about on the radio, continents away, and then six months later is in your house kicking your tail.

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detrius

Damn, I spent a week in hospital (socialized health care ftw!) and this thread is still going on.

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Tyche Shepherd

I do wish they would spell it correctly - My scrabble set says it should be H4N1



...Unless they are Greek I suppose , but then it would be called Eta Ena Nu Ena

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Nibb Tardis

The reason the 1918 flu was so bad, was because of a variety of reasons, including the fact that millions of men were stuck together in war trenches sitting in their own feces among rotting corpses.

Also remember that general hygiene and medicine in that era weren't exactly on par with today's standards. There were no vaccine or antibiotics and hardly any knowledge of viruses and how they worked.

Beebo Brink

Talk of feces and rotting corpses is nicely dramatic but would be more pertinent to a discussion of cholera than a flu pandemic. That hardly describes the conditions on the continental U.S. where men were in nice clean barracks. The reason the flu was so bad among young healthy adults was that it created a very strong immune reaction, which was actually what killed people.

Travel back in 1918 was also much slower than today, when we can pass flu from one end of the country to another in a matter of hours. So any complacency we may have above one factor is going to be off-balanced by another.

Vaccines are of little use if the virus mutates to a new form. It takes time to develop a new vaccine, and in case you hadn't noticed, the one vaccine we have now is in such short supply that only a fraction of our population will have access to it. My local doctor's office has been unable to obtain it for their patients, and the order for the company where I work has also remained unfilled.

Another little historical tidbit which is often overlooked is that the public health system at the time had a much larger capacity than we do now. The prevailing philosophy of the time was to have sufficient facilities and staff to cover emergency loads. Today's on-demand health care does not allow for such "waste" and is therefore unable to handle sharp sudden spikes as may occur during a pandemic.

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Sleepy Wobbit

One thing that is still bothering me is that if docs and clinics etc are not testing for H1N1, how do they know that's what all these people have? Aren't the symptoms the same for general flu too?

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Arilynn

The CDC is suggesting that people do not get tested if they have uncomplicated symptoms and are in an area with the virus. It only recommends testing hospitalized patients with suspected flu, patients who die and were thought to have the flu, or patients in which the testing results would influence decisions about care and prevention: Link. So if these guidelines are followed, testing is occurring for both patient care and public health reasons, but it is limited. From a treatment perspective, as long as the symptoms don't require hospitalization or other special care, I think it doesn't really matter if it is the 2009 H1N1 virus or some other strain - for any flu virus, the treatment window and options are limited.

Gigs

The data so far shows that there is no general flu yet this year! Something like 99%+ of the subtyping is novel 2009 H1N1, with the other 1% being inconclusive.

Of course, like you point out, that data may be incomplete.

Gigs

Normal flu is the non-novel H1 and H3 subtypes (and a little B), which aren't on the chart. (Would be red and blue)

Beebo Brink

I think someone, probably Jesse, mentioned this somewhere up thread. That H1N1 was so prevalent right now, that pretty much anyone with the flu was likely to have it rather than other flu strains.

Again, as noted several times, the current version of H1N1 is mild. The concern is that this particular strain shows the ability to morph quickly, has the key elements that made the 1918 flu so strong, and that there is no immune resistance to it in the population. It has the potential to be a problem of much greater proportions.