When I first read posts about this on Twitter, I thought it was a hoax. The first I heard was that a British Airways crew member had been raced off to hospital after arriving from Mexico feeling ill. He was immediately raced to Northwick Park Hospital and quarantined. There have been possible cases identified in
The reason I thought it might have been a hoax was because of the EndGame story, suggesting that a virus which is spreading through Mexico might have been man made. For many years there have been fears that terrorists would use viruses as a weapon. Most of the comments about this seem to be from conspiracy theorists and noone appears to have claimed credit for this, so hopefully that is just something being discussed to add a little fear factor.
Once I followed more links to a Reuters story that said the virus has already killed 68 people in Mexico and that the Swine Virus was now crossing from human to human. While we were relaxed and happy that we had missed the bird flu, it looks like there is a new pandemic threat.
Once again people are rushing out to buy face masks and there have been reports of people hawking flu masks at 25 times the going rate.
I’ll watch with interest to see if this can be contained and whether people in other countries need to be concerned. With international travel these days it would be very easy for a virus like this to spread around the world. For more information on swine flu, check out International SOS.
When I wrote this blog this morning, I thought it would be a long time before there was any risk in New Zealand, but then a group from Rangitoto College, a km from my office returned from Mexico on a school trip and 25 people were quarantined, some of them with flu-like symptoms. And at Narita Airport in Tokyo, they are taking the temperature of people arriving on overseas flights.
I guess the good thing is that after the previous scares and preparedness for bird flu, many countries are better prepared for a pandemic. It appears that patients with this flu are responding well to Tamiflu, the vacine which was made to help with bird flu.
Now we are told that this has been going around since February at least and that cases have been found in 10 states of the US.
This might be a good time again to be prepared for a pandemic, to make sure you can survive at home for a few weeks if you have to and be very careful with your hygiene, especially if, like me you are shaking hands or in close contact with many people on a daily basis.
A Disease A Day has lots of valuable information about the virus itself: How does it feel? How is it discovered?How is it treated? What happens after treatment? The bottom line – How do I avoid it?
While my blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.
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