Swine Flu - Updates

Present Death Toll : 103
Infection :1600

Yesterday I started watching the Swine Flu emergency and saw the news channels reporting the death toll as 16 people and 800 infected in Mexico. Public places were closed it operation for a number of days.

Later in the evening, it has increased to 60 and 1000+ cases reported alone in Mexico. All the public events are canceled. That is more than 500 events, including concerts and sports games, were canceled in the metropolis of 20 million.

Current WHO phase of pandemic alert

Today(26-April-09) morning, what I am seeing is an increase in the death toll, rose up to 81 from yesterdays 16 and increase of 60+ people in 24 hours. The number of infected are now 1400. Now events like Sunday mass and small gathering are either canceled or asked by the government to cancel them.

The Mexican government has decided to exercise the powers and the Mexico's president assumed new powers Saturday to isolate people infected with a deadly swine flu strain as authorities struggled to contain an outbreak that world health officials warned could become a global epidemic.

Now, even detaining the ill may not keep the strain — a combination of swine, bird and human influenza that people may have no natural immunity to — from spreading, epidemiologists say.

If it become a pandemic, it may have the potential to kill one third of the humans worldwide.

A team from the Centers for Disease Control(CDC) of USA has started investigating on this (8 cases of swine flu has been reported from California) and has set up a unit in Mexico.

They have noticed something strange: The flu was killing people aged 20 to 40. Flu victims are usually either infants or the elderly. The Spanish flu pandemic, which killed at least 40 million people worldwide in 1918-19, also first struck otherwise healthy young adults

Early detection and treatment are key to stopping any outbreak. WHO guidance calls for isolating the sick and blanketing everyone around them with anti-viral drugs such as Tamiflu.

This swine flu and regular flu can have similar symptoms — mostly fever, cough and sore throat, though some of the U.S. victims who recovered also experienced vomiting and diarrhea. But unlike with regular flu, humans don't have natural immunity to a virus that includes animal genes — and new vaccines can take months to bring into use.