H1N1 Category 2 Update

As per the World Health Organization’s latest August 2009 stats, the H1N1 flu is hitting South Africa and Bolivia hard. It has peaked off in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina. In the tropical areas of Asia and Central America, the flu is increasing or remaining high in identified cases. In Japan, the number of cases is increasing again.

Ratings of a pandemic: if the WHO indicates the H1N1 has turned from a Category 2 that it is, to a Category 5, it is time to reconsider your health practices and where you are planning on being for the next while. The chances of finding the flu kit you need becomes more difficult, and at the very least, wear a cloth or shirt around your face when in public if you cannot find the flu kits you need. This is the time to leave any travel destinations and get home, or if you are stuck in a country other than your homeland, keep a six foot distance from others if you have to be amongst other people.

There are a couple places you can keep updated: WHO keeps a Twitter feed update, and Google has a flu trend tracker. I like the Google tracker, which is based on searches from people throughout the world on the virus. It is then graphed alongside the government flu data. This surveillance that Google tracks may be able to provide us crucial information to show us advanced warning of a global outbreak.

It’s difficult to imagine a flu hitting an international population so hard that millions are dying, but that is exactly what happened in 1918 with the Spanish flu. Now, with global travel so prevalent, we are looking at hundreds of millions dying if we had the same type of pandemic flu as back then. Cheers. The vaccines available will not meet the population needs, nor will it necessarily be effective as viruses can be modified into more deadlier strains of the virus. The Spanish flu lasted for two years, killed over 50 million people, and infected about 500 million people. No area was immune from it, and even the most remote regions such as the Arctic and South Pacific were hit. When it hit, the secondary cause of death was a deadly form of pneumonia, in which the patient basically drowned after their lungs filled with fluid from hemorrhaging.