Swine flu could hospitalise 2 mn, kill 90,000 in US
Lalit K Jha/PTI / Washington Aug 25, 2009, 11:51 IST
There are possibilities that swine flu could engulf a large part of the US ending up in hospitalising two million people this winter and killing as much as 90,000 in the country, a White House report said today.
"By the end of 2009, 60 to 120 million Americans would have experienced symptomatic infection with 2009-H1N1; nearly one to two million would have been hospitalised, with about 150,000-300,000 cared for in ICUs; and somewhere between 30,000 and 90,000 people would have died, the majority of them under 50 years of age," said the report 'On US Preparations for 2009-H1N1 Influenza'.
Overall, 20 per cent to 40 per cent of the population could develop symptoms of the strain commonly known as swine flu. During a normal flu season, the virus kills about 35,000 Americans.
However, the authors of the report released by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said this was one of the possibilities and not a prediction.
"We emphasise that this is a plausible scenario, not a prediction. By way of comparison, it is less severe by a factor of three (in terms of expected deaths per capita) than the 'reasonable worst case' planning assumptions, publicised by the UK government, for the H1N1 resurgence in that country," the report said.
The report concludes that the 2009-H1N1 flu is unlikely to resemble the deadly flu pandemic of 1918-19. But in contrast to the benign version of swine flu that emerged in 1976, the report says the current strain "poses a serious health threat" to the nation.
"The issue is not that the virus is more deadly than other flu strains, but rather that it is likely to infect more people than usual because it is a new strain against which few people have immunity. This could mean that doctors' offices and hospitals may get filled to capacity," said a statement issued by the White House.
"As the nation prepares for what could be a challenging fall, it is crucial that our public health decisions are informed by the very best scientific and technological information," said John P Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and a co-chair of PCAST.
Among the group's prime recommendations are accelerate the preparation of flu vaccine for distribution to high-risk individuals, clarify guidelines for the use of antiviral medicines, upgrade the current system for tracking the pandemic's progress and making resource allocation decisions, accelerate the development of communication strategies— including Web-based social networking tools—to broadcast public health messages that can help mitigate the pandemic's impact and identify a White House point person with primary authority to coordinate key decisions across the government as the pandemic evolves.
The report recommends intensive public education campaigns to reinforce those key behaviours and also calls for policy adjustments that can reduce economic and other incentives that might encourage people to risk infecting others.
For example, workplaces could liberalise rules for absenteeism so employees don't feel pressured to come to work when sick and school districts could arrange alternative means of distributing lunches to children who are sick but who normally depend on school meals for adequate nourishment, it noted.
Why isn't anyone noting that the report also stated, "the 2009-H1N1 virus does not thus far seem to show the virulence associated with the devastating pandemic of 1918-19; moreover, medical science now has many potent tools at our disposal to mitigate an influenza pandemic in ways that were not possible ninety years ago."?
http://www.examiner.com/x-20147-Schuylkill-County-Independent-Examiner~y2009m8d25-Analyzing-PCATs-swine-flu-report-Part-1
Or that the death rate, per WHO's calculations, is less than 1%, and that assumes that every single person who was infected is diagnosed; in reality, many people are most likely staying home and having chicken noodle soup.
http://www.examiner.com/x-20147-Schuylkill-County-Independent-Examiner~y2009m8d21-Swine-flu-explosion-to-come
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