EPIDEMIOLOGICAL IMPACT of H1N1

tayana — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:21:53 +0000

The WHO now reports 816 flu deaths worldwide, since the first cases in March. Seasonal flu, it says, kills 250,000 to 500,000 people each year, or 744 to 1488 deaths. So after over four months, we’ve finally got swine flu cases equal to those at the lower end of the range for a single day of seasonal flu.

For the U.S., deaths are equivalent to what we’d see in one or two days of seasonal flu during the season.And that’s your pandemic panic update.

I agree, gratefully, that the numbers are mercifully small. That’s scarce comfort to the family of the Brazilian girl who died en route home from Florida (see below), and others who have lost loved ones.

But Fumento is absolutely right. Given the millions who die every day, H1N1 is almost unnoticeable. And I seriously doubt that it will suddenly mutate into a monster that murders us in our beds next October.

Compared to deaths from malaria, HIV/AIDS, TB, diarrhea, and a host of other ills that flesh is heir to, swine flu is not a big deal.

But note that Fumento doesn’t even blink at the mortality of seasonal flu. He takes it as a given, a cost of doing business. Half a million deaths a year? And our point is?

Northrop Frye, our greatest Canadian scholar, once observed that insanity is a social judgment, not a medical diagnosis. And some deaths are more an issue of social and cultural judgment than something defined by a coroner’s report.

On September 11, 2001, 3,000 people died in the Al-Qaeda attacks. Those deaths weighed far more in American culture and politics than any others in that year…which included 30,000 Americans killed by gunshot wounds, half of them self-inflicted.

In other words, the US suffers ten 9/11 mortalities every year, and has done so since at least the 1960s. Put it another way: Americans inflict another Vietnam on themselves about every two years, just by pulling the trigger on one another or themselves.

These deaths draw, at most, a day’s attention in the local media, unless it’s some wretched teenager shooting his classmates. That might get three days’ coverage.

The public-health consequences of 30,000 violent deaths a year are effectively ignored, just like the estimated 36,000 seasonal flu deaths and who knows how many traffic deaths.

They simply don’t matter to Americans or anyone else, any more than the rapes and murders committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan that resulted directly from 9/11. All deaths are equal, but some are more equal than others.

So what interests me about H1N1 and H5N1 is the cultural impact of these new diseases, and what that tells us about ourselves. It’s the rare and unusual that draws our attention: we have lots of flu blogs, but precious few about malaria and TB and dengue. We shrug off deaths from such causes, but a new flu virus throws us into spasms of anxiety.

As a result, the multi-billion-dollar tourism industry in Mexico is in huge trouble. The airline industry worldwide is hemorrhaging money. Pork producers now know what it’s like to be collateral damage. Public-school budgets from Florida to Queensland to Cape Town are going to suffer, and don’t even talk about the financial stress on health-care systems worldwide.

Whatever bird flu has been in epidemiological terms, it’s been an economic disaster from Nigeria to Pakistan to China to Indonesia. H1N1 has been even worse, however few and forgettable its human casualties have been.

And whatever the epidemiological impact of H1N1, its cultural, social, political and economic impacts are far greater. That, not its absolute numbers, is why it deserves our attention. To laugh at the numbers of dead is to miss the point completely.

New Finding of HIV Variant

tayana — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 04:47:28 +0000

A new strain of the virus that causes AIDS has been discovered in a woman from the African nation of Cameroon. It differs from the three known strains of human immunodeficiency virus and appears to be closely related to a form of simian virus recently discovered in wild gorillas, researchers report in Monday’s edition of the journal.

The finding “highlights the continuing need to watch closely for the emergence for new HIV variants, particularly in western central Africa,” said the researchers, led by Jean-Christophe Plantier of the University of Rouen, France.

The three previously known HIV strains are related to the simian virus that occurs in chimpanzees.

The most likely explanation for the new find is gorilla-to-human transmission, Plantier’s team said. But they added they cannot rule out the possibility that the new strain started in chimpanzees and moved into gorillas and then humans, or moved directly from chimpanzees to both gorillas and humans.

The 62-year-old patient tested positive for HIV in 2004, shortly after moving to Paris from Cameroon, according to the researchers. She had lived near Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, but said she had no contact with apes or bush meat, a name often given to meat from wild animals in tropical countries.

The woman currently shows no signs of AIDS and remains untreated, though she still carries the virus, the researchers said.

How widespread this strain is remains to be determined. Researchers said it could be circulating unnoticed in Cameroon or elsewhere. The virus’ rapid replication indicates that it is adapted to human cells, the researchers reported.

Their research was supported by the French Health Watch Institute, the French National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis and Rouen University Hospital.

A separate paper, also in Nature Medicine, reports that people with genital herpes remain at increased risk of HIV infection even after the herpes sores have healed and the skin appears normal.

Researchers led by Drs. Lawrence Corey and Jia Zhu of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center found that long after the areas where the herpes sores existed seem to be clear, they still have immune-cell activity that can encourage HIV infection.

Herpes is marked by recurring outbreaks and has been associated with higher rates of infection with HIV. It had been thought that the breaks in the skin were the reason for higher HIV rates, but a study last year found that treatment of herpes with drugs did not reduce the HIV risk.

The researchers tested the skin of herpes patients for several weeks after their sores had healed and found that, compared with other genital skin, from twice to 37 times more immune cells remained at the locations where the sores had been.

HIV targets immune cells and in laboratory tests the virus reproduced three to five times faster in tissue from the healed sites as in tissue from other areas.

“Understanding that even treated (herpes) infections provide a cellular environment conducive to HIV infection suggests new directions for HIV prevention research,” commented Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.

That study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Tietze Foundation.

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EPIDEMIOLOGICAL IMPACT of H1N1

New Finding of HIV Variant