>>Swine Flu Vaccine Possible by October

A U.S. health official said a swine flu vaccine could be available as early as October, but only if production and testing run smoothly this summer.

Full Article: here.

>>Australia swine flu ship isolated

A cruise ship carrying 2,000 passengers has been ordered to stay at sea off the coast of Australia after three crew tested positive for swine flu.

Full Article: here.

>>New York City reopens schools shuttered by flu

Students have returned to more than two dozen New York City public schools that were closed because of swine flu.

Full Article: here.

>>Politician’s Novel Idea for Mexican Tourism:  Statue of Swine Flu Survivor

Édgar Hernández, the Mexican kindergartner who is the first person known to have contracted the swine flu now circling the globe, may soon have a statue erected in his honor in the mountain village where he lives.

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[Gov. Fidel Herrera] considers Édgar to be not “Patient Zero,” the source of a global outbreak, but rather the first person in the world known to have survived the virus. In an interview with local reporters on Sunday, the governor likened the statue, which might be made of concrete or bronze, to the Manneken Pis in Brussels, the sculpture of a little boy peeing in a fountain.

Full Article: here.

>>Doctors ponder separate swine flu vaccine

Medical experts are still debating whether to offer a separate swine flu vaccine for Ontarians, Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams says.

The annual flu vaccine offered free to provincial residents is already in production for this fall’s influenza season, he said. “So if we’re going to make one for H1N1 it would have to be a separate one,” Williams said yesterday.

Full Article: here.

>>Gwynne Dyer: Of Pandemics and Pork

We seem to have got away with it this time. The swine flu turned out not to be a global killer, at least not in this first go-round. But we have had a fright, and maybe we should learn something from it.

In 1994, only 10% of American pigs lived out their brief lives in vast factory farms. Only seven years later, in 2001, 72% did.
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During the past several thousand years, major quick-killer epidemic diseases that affect human beings have emerged, on average only once every few hundred years. But now that we keep most of our livestock in crowded cages for their entire lives, generally living above a cess-pool of their own excrement and exchanging disease pathogens at blinding speed, the speed of evolution of the pathogens has accelerated dramatically.
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The giant corporations that drove most small hog-breeders out of business in the United States — from more than a million farms raising 53 million hogs in 1965 to only 65 000 facilities growing 65 million hogs today — are now active all over the world. In Romania, for example, the number of hog farmers fell from 477 000 to just 52 000 in only four years after the agribusiness giants arrived on the scene in 2003.
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But then, pork prices in the United States dropped by one-fifth between 1970 and 2004, according to the US Department of Agriculture. That means that factory farming is saving the average American consumer US$29 a year, or about US$2, 40 a month. What’s the risk of a lethal global pandemic compared to savings like that?

Full Article:  here.

>>WHO meets on production of swine flu vaccine

As swine flu cases topped 6,600 worldwide, vaccine makers and other experts met Thursday at the World Health Organization to discuss the tough decisions that must be made quickly to fight the evolving virus.

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“It’s a foregone conclusion,” said David Fedson, a vaccines expert and former professor of medicine at the University of Virginia. “If we don’t invest in an H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine, then possibly we could have a reappearance of this virus in a mild, moderate, or catastrophic form and we would have absolutely nothing.”

Most flu vaccine companies can only make one vaccine at a time: seasonal flu vaccine or pandemic vaccine. Production takes months and it is impossible to switch halfway through if health officials make a mistake.

Full Article:  here.

>>Swine Flu Outbreak Shuts Down 3 Schools

New York City has closed three schools in response to a swine flu outbreak that has left an assistant principal in critical condition and sent hundreds of children home with flu symptoms, in a flare-up of the virus that caused such concern around the world last month.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) said four students and the assistant principal have documented cases of the H1N1 flu at a Queens middle school. More than 50 students at the school have gone home sick with flulike symptoms, he said. At another Queens middle school, 241 students were absent Thursday. Dozens more were sick at an elementary school.

Full Article:  here.

>>Man gives pigs flu, pigs give flu right back?
Swine flu roots traced to Spanish flu

>>Preempting pandemics: Using the internet as an outbreak watchdog
Did pandemic-watchers miss the signs online

>>Canada hit with first severe case of swine flu

An Alberta girl with no apparent link to Mexico is in hospital with Canada’s first reported severe case of swine flu — a sign the nasty bug is now spreading here at home.

Public health officials acknowledged Monday the H1N1 influenza is infecting those with no immediately obvious connections to Mexico. Federal officials reported 41 new cases Monday, bringing the total to 140 across the country.

Dr. David Butler-Jones, the chief public health officer, said news of the more severe case “although disconcerting, is not surprising and does not change our course of action.”

Full Article:  here.

>>Too much knowledge can exaggerate the danger of a pandemic

The media, with their urge to simplify and to focus on immediate events, tend to aggregate raw numbers and to concentrate upon them as a measure of the seriousness and magnitude of the event being covered.

Thus we hear constant updates on the number of fatalities from multiple media platforms — newspapers, radio, 24-hour TV news channels that update every hour, websites and bloggers who range from the highly informed to those who are already linking the current events to sunspot activity or suggesting it’s an engineered virus released from germ warfare labs.

“Eighty-one dead in Mexico; U.S. declares emergency,” read one of the headlines Sunday. Yes, 81 dead in Mexico is something to grieve and is cause for public concern. Each one of those dead represents the anguish of a family. Yet, as the aphorism goes, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. It’s confusing the statistic for the tragedy that exaggerates fear.

We seldom hear daily updates on the numbers of those infected who have recovered, for example. Yet consider the much-cited Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. It’s common for commentary to cite infection rates and total associated fatalities.

It’s estimated that about 28 per cent of Canadians and Americans contracted the Spanish flu. Worldwide, an estimated 2.5 per cent of the sick died of complications, which made the pandemic one of the most lethal flu outbreaks in recorded history. Certainly it was one that imprinted itself upon human consciousness for several generations.

But there’s another way to look at those statistics. You might observe, for example, that they mean that even during the worst ravages of the 1918 flu, 97.5 per cent of those infected survived and recovered. Or that 72 per cent of the population — even in the absence of the sophisticated public health planning and infrastructure that Canada and the U.S. have since built — was not infected during the pandemic.

Full Article:  here.

>>The quest for a swine flu vaccine

It is a global endeavour and will bring the public and the private together, but it could still take several months before a safe and effective jab is available.

Yet amid all this activity, the answer could in fact be right under our noses.

Tests are being carried out to establish whether the current seasonal flu vaccine could provide cross protection against what we are seeing at the moment, as there are similarities between the H1N1 human flu viruses and the new H1N1 swine flu.

Full Article:  here.

>>7 more swine flu cases confirmed in Canada, all mild

The number of Canadians confirmed to have suffered mild cases of the human form of swine flu swelled to 13 on Tuesday, with new cases reported in Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia.

The new cases in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia were anticipated, and do not change the federal government’s course of action…

The four cases, which were the first to be confirmed in Ontario since the disease spread outside Mexico, were all mild and involved people who had travelled to Mexico recently. Two were from the York region, north of Toronto, and the other two were from the Durham region, east of Toronto.

Full Article:  here.

>>Obama seeks $1.5 bln for swine flu as cases jump

President Barack Obama asked Congress on Tuesday for an additional $1.5 billion (1 billion pounds) to fight swine flu as the confirmed U.S. caseload jumped to 65 people in six states in what doctors fear may become a full pandemic.

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Obama, in a letter to Congress, said the $1.5 billion would give the government “maximum flexibility” as it fights the disease, supplementing antiviral stockpiles, adding medical equipment and starting preparations for a vaccine.

Full Article:  here.

>>The Naming of Swine Flu, a Curious Matter

What to call the new strain of flu raising alarms around the world has taken on political, economic and diplomatic overtones.

Pork producers question whether the term “swine flu” is appropriate, given that the new virus has not yet been isolated in samples taken from pigs in Mexico or elsewhere.

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Government officials in Thailand, one of the world’s largest meat exporters, have started referring to the disease as “Mexican flu.” An Israeli deputy health minister — an ultra-Orthodox Jew — said his country would do the same, to keep Jews from having to say the word “swine.”

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This is not a food-borne illness, virus — it is not correct to refer to it as swine flu because really that’s not what this is about,” Mr. Vilsack said.

Full Article:  here.

>>Canadian health officials warn against travel to Mexico

A Canadian health agency is warning against travel to Mexico, where there’s an outbreak of human swine flu, unless absolutely necessary.

The Public Health Agency of Canada issued the warning late Monday, saying travellers should postpone any non-essential travel to the country until further notice.

The agency urged travellers to take precautionary measures such as getting a flu shot, frequently washing their hands, and covering coughs and sneezes.

Full Article:  here.

>>Swine flu spreads to Middle East, South Pacific; New Zealand reports 11 confirmed cases, Israel, one

Swine flu spread to the Middle East and the South Pacific on Tuesday, as New Zealand reported 11 confirmed cases and Israel said it had one. World health officials raced to contain the outbreak, raising a global alert level as more deaths were reported in Mexico.

Swine flu has already spread to seven countries and appears to be jumping borders via airplane flights. Those infected in New Zealand are a group of students and teachers who returned recently from a trip to Mexico, where the virus is suspected to have infected nearly 2,000 people and caused more than 150 deaths.

Fifty cases — none fatal — have been confirmed in the United States. Six cases have been confirmed in Canada, two in Spain and two in Scotland.

European Union officials reported Tuesday flu cases were also being probed in Denmark, Sweden, Greece, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Ireland, in addition to Spain and Britain.

Full article:  here.

>>Swine flu: Experts warned in February that new strain could cause pandemic

In February, scientists at the International Meeting on Emerging Disease and Surveillance in Vienna, Austria, said so much attention had been focused on H5N1 that the medical and scientific community risked missing the start of an outbreak caused by another strain.

Prof Thomas Monath from Harvard University said that another strain could trigger a pandemic and then “we would be screwed”.
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Prof Monath said: “If it’s a new strain of flu it will be nine months to a year before we have got really good geared up vaccine production. We will rely on antiviral drugs first and then it is a crash effort to make a vaccine. In the meantime there will be clearly an emerging uncontained problem,” he said.

“To detect it early and try to contain it in the early stages is the best chance we have got,” Prof Monath added.

Other experts at the meeting also believed the scientific community was “betting on the wrong horse” by continuing to focus solely on H5N1.

Full Article:  here.

>>WHO raises pandemic alert level to 4

The World Health Organisation raised its pandemic alert level over the deadly swine flu virus to phase 4 on Monday, indicating the infection could spread between humans to cause “community-level outbreaks”.

Experts held four hours of emergency talks on whether to raise the alert level from phase 3 due to the outbreak which has killed up to 149 people in Mexico and spread to the United States, Canada and Europe.

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The scale of alert levels goes from 1 to 6. The system was set at phase 3 in 2005 when WHO introduced it to monitor bird flu. The pandemic alert level has never before been raised.

In a statement, the Geneva-based United Nations agency said that “containment of the outbreak is not feasible. The current focus should be on mitigation measures”.

Full Article:  here.

>>Swine flu outbreak reaches Europe

The first cases of swine flu have been confirmed in Europe.

Two British people admitted to hospital in Scotland after returning from a holiday in Mexico have been confirmed as having the virus.

In Spain, a man has tested positive for swine flu and 17 other people are under investigation, officials said.

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Besides Mexico, the UK and Spain, there have also been confirmed cases in the US and Canada. Suspected cases are being investigated in Brazil, Israel, Australia and New Zealand.

Full Article:  here

>>World Bank ready to raise funding for swine flu

The World Bank is ready to increase funding to Mexico and any other developing country around the world to deal with swine flu, a senior Bank official said on Monday.

In an interview with Reuters, Keith Hansen, health sector manager for Latin America and the Caribbean, said experience with previous illnesses shows that countries should act as early as possible to prepare for the flu’s possible spread.

“We put in place a funding facility for avian flu a few years ago and it is broadly defined so it can encompass this flu, and if need be the bank is fully prepared to add money to that facility for Mexico and for any other countries that may be affected,” Hansen said.

Full Article: here.

>>Key Posts Remain Vacant as Untested Pandemic Response Plan Implemented

As they confront the growing swine flu crisis, President Obama’s administration is attempting to implement a never-before-tested pandemic response plan while dozens of key public health and emergency response jobs in the administration remain vacant.

The president has yet to fill 15 top positions at the health department or name a full-time director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and five more nominations…

The top post at the CDC remains open but is being filled by an acting director. And at the Department of Homeland Security, which is leading the federal government’s response to the swine flu outbreak, the functions of nearly 20 senior-level posts are being temporarily performed by career civil service employees.

Full Article:  here.

>>March 21st

Simple techniques slash hospital infections: meeting

Jasper Palmer didn’t think he was doing anything special when he balled up his paper hospital gown and stuffed it into one of his gloves. He just knew it was tidy and would stop the gown from spreading germs.

But the technique is one of the simple innovations that has reduced rates of infection with so-called superbugs at his and other hospitals by 26 percent to 62 percent, infection control experts told a meeting of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America in San Diego on Saturday.

>>March 23rd

Simple ideas from hospital staff cut superbug rates

Borrowing ideas from hospital workers who have devised their own clever strategies for reducing superbug spread can lead to huge drops in infection rates throughout a hospital, say infection control experts.

The experts told a meeting of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America in San Diego on Saturday that using an approach called positive deviance (PD) at three U.S. hospitals helped to reduce the incidence of MRSA (multifaceted methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) at their facilities by 26 to 62 per cent.

>>March 25th

Northern Ireland scientists find a new weapon in MRSA war

A new weapon that could help wipe out the deadly MRSA virus has been developed by researchers from Northern Ireland.
Experts from Queen’s University have discovered new agents that can kill colonies of MRSA and other antiboitic resistant hospital-acquired infections.

The antimicrobial agents also prevent any growth of the potentially lethal bacteria.

C difficile outbreak leaves three hospital patients dead

Three patients have died as a direct result of a C difficile outbreak at hospital in the South East.

East Sussex Hospitals trust has recorded 62 cases of the infection at Eastbourne District General Hospital since 1 January and has reviewed the histories of the affected patients.

The trust said on Tuesday that three patients had died as a direct result of being infected and it had contributed to a further 10 deaths.

>>March 27th

‘Search and destroy’ kills MRSA

A private hospital in Dublin has instituted a strict ’search-and-destroy’ policy to combat MRSA infections.

See a video of Dr. Fidelma Fitzpatrick from the Irish Health Protection Surveillance Centre discuss the facts of healthcare-associated infections here.