This morning I was reading a column in the Sunday Herald by radio talkshow host Kerre Woodham saying that SwineFlu is a load of hogwash. Half an hour ago I was at the checkout at my local Foodtown and overheard a girl saying that she was told not to go to school next week at Westlake College (On Auckland’s North Shore) as there had been a confirmed case of SwineFlu at the school. She said that initially only year 12 girls were told to stay away, but that she since been told that the whole school is to be closed for a week. The fact that she was working at a checkout at the supermarket suggests that as well as spreading the news, she could also of course be spreading the virus.
I have said all along that, the people who are saying that because bird flu turned out to be a non event, this one will too, are going to get a rude awakening. This thing is spreading quickly, with a rise of 65% in the last 24 hours to 71 confirmed cases, while many more are expected to be confirmed in coming days as the NZ Police College has closed for a week and 41 tourists in the South Island town of Hokitika have also been confirmed.
One question being asked is whether employers should pay their staff if the company closes its doors during a quarantine. The answer appears to be no, other than normal holiday pay conditions. If it turns out to be as serious as is suggested, this could be a major concern. The biggest concern though is people who are sick but go to work anyway, because they can’t financially afford to miss work.
Perhaps the answer is obvious, but what should you do if one of your family members with whom you live is ill and could have Swine Flu?Does the whole family have to stay home, or do they only stay home if the person is confirmed to have the virus, which takes 72 hours after the swab.
In the last hour or so, WHO has announced that we now have a Pandemic, the first in 41 years as infections have climbed over 30,000 people. As I said in my previous blog, many people still have their heads in the sand, thinking it won’t happen to them, but pretty much everyone I know is aware of people close to them who either have N1H1, or have been asked to quarantine themselves just in case.
WHO Chief Margaret Chan made the announcement a short while ago saying that “Swine Flu is unstoppable.” She also went on to say that it has progressed so far that it is no longer possible to follow the track of the virus and htat the statistics only reflect the data from countries who have good tracking measures in place.
This takes me back to my prvious blog where I asked if you were prepared. It is now quite likely that you may have to be quarantined and if this is the case, your whole family may find itself in this situation. I meet and shake hands with a lot of people every day, my wife works in a retirement village and my daughter is a school teacher. Between us, the chances of getting exposed become much higher.
Just to put this into perspective, the last time WHO declared a pandemic, the Hong Kong Flu, 41 years ago, around 1 million people died.
Now I’m not trying to say the sky is falling, but I am saying you need to consider what it means to be prepared. If you have a little more food in the cupboards and don’t need it, cool, have a non swine flu party when its all over. Make sure you wash your hands regularly after contact with other people, you can buy handy little bottles of hand cleaner that doesn’t require water.
A final reminder for you, who are thinking, I’m young and healthy, it’s the elderly people who get killed with these viruses. Think again, the majority of deaths with Swine Flu have been aged 30-50 years old.
I should have seen this one coming from a mile away. While a lot of people still have their heads in the sand, the New Zealand Government have made Swine Flu a notifiable disease. In itself, that just makes sense, but in fact according to a NZ Herald story this morning, this means that they have authority to demand that people isolate themselves at home, or face fines or mandatory isolation in hospital or worse.
There are many things to start thinking now, even if you still think it won’t happen to you. If you are isolated at home, do you have everything you need for at least a week? Will this mean that your family that lives with you or your flatmates will also have to stay home too? After all they will be at a higher risk of also getting infected. So if your whole house is quarantined, how do you get your basic supplies like bread and milk?
If pundits are right and it effects up to 60% of the population, or even only 10% are isolated, what happens to business? Grocery stores and other retailers who are in spittle distance of their customers will be at high risk because they are dealing with large volumes of people all day.
The schools represent a high risk, they have always helped spread illnesses, if one child has the measles, flu or any other contagious disease, it is a given that several others will also get it.
If people disobey the isolation requirements, then there are even greater risks, because this group will very likely carry the virus, so I have no problem with the mandate. However, the risk of people not obeying the rules is also high. In today’s economy, people don’t want to risk losing their jobs and many will continue to work because they need the money. In my office for example, staff get 5 days of sick leave a year, which is pretty easy to bite into if you have a flu or cold. There are people who will therefore have no sick leave, or not enough available and don’t want to use their holidays, but can’t afford to be sick without leave, so for as long as they can, they will continue to work.
Schools have been given detailed instructions on what to do in the case of an outbreak, including hygiene instructions, but in my opinion, most businesses are thinking that Bird Flu went nowhere and Swine Flu will do the same, so they aren’t taking precautions and they don’t have contingency plans should a large group of staff fall ill. The air conditioning systems will do a good job of spreading the virus, and some businesses may have to cease trading for several weeks, because while the illness might be gone in 7 days or so, people won’t be considerate enough to all catch the Swine Flu at the same time.
Of course they could go to a Swine Flu Party. What sort of idiots would do something like that? Well it appears they are, using the same rationale that moms use when their friends children have chicken pox, “Let’s get it over with now”. The problem with Swine Flu is that unlike traditional flu, the virus has no respect for age or health and is capable of killing people of all ages and of course the domino effect would hasten the spread of this nasty illness.
The new powers aren’t just a NZ initiative however, the same is occuring around the world, in Australia, Mexico of course and most other countries are now drafting legislation that will help them try to fight this problem.
So, are you ready? Do you still think it won’t happen to you, your friends or family, or perhaps your work mates? How prepared are you?
Japan has always been very sensitive to protecting people from viruses. In the western world we have been looking at masks from the perspective of keeping ourselves safe from others. When I visited Tokyo for the first time I asked about the people I saw wearing face masks and found that this is normal practice for people who have a respiratory illness such as a cold or flu, so that they could continue to work and go out while protecting other people from their germs. In NZ we don’t look at it that way, if we share our germs, its just tough luck for the recipient.
Of course one of the problems in Japan is shear numbers of people, not dissimilar to Mexico City. I used to stay in Shinjuku and would regularly catch local trains to get around Tokyo City. Shinjuku station serves over 1 million people a day, the first time I visited Tokyo they still had men with white gloves, pushing people onto the trains to make way for more.
Today I read an announcement that Japan had closed over 4,000 schools and kindergartens as around 170 confirmed cases of Swine Flu had been found around Kobe and Osaka. It seems that there are as yet no confirmed cases in Tokyo and of course authorities are hoping that they can contain it, although chances are it has already been rushed in by bullet train.
In the meantime, downunder, it is as if it’s all over, and people are starting to think that it was all overhyped and just another case of bird flu, where there was a brief panic followed by nothing.
It seems that there is so much confusion about Swine Flu that it makes it very difficult for the average Joe Citizen to know what to think. On one hand we hear stories that it may be more infectious than we thought, while on the other hand scientists are postulating that it is quite weak.
Traditionally the influenza virus targets babies and elederly people, both groups having weakened immunity and comparisons with the 1918-19 flu epidemic stop here, because the Swine Flu is killing people of all ages and seems to particularly attack people in the 25-40 age group. Noone knows why that is at this stage, but it is certainly another reason why people should be more vigilent, especially given that this is probably the age group that does the most international travelling and therefore more likely to either catch the virus, or to be carriers.
As a footnote, some people are thinking that because WHO hasn’t raised the alert to Phase 6, it can’t be too serious yet. The official move to Phase 6, which is specified as a pandemic is only based on the number of countries that it has been found in, not the severity of the illness. Officially a pandemic is when the disease is global, but given that it has now been found in 40 countries, many countries are asking WHO to announce it as a pandemic now.
While this 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.
I have to start by saying I don’t think it was, but it is a ligitimate question, given that bioviolence is something that many countries around the world will be considering and it is an obvious threat from terrorists. We don’t hear anything about the neutron bomb these days, but the concept of killing off people but leaving the environment intact, is not new.
Several years ago I was helping a water authority with mobile data communications around the same time as a meeting of world leaders . Even though bioterrorism has not been seen in this country, there were was hightened vigilence of the city’s water reservoirs, to ensure that they were not deliberately contaminated as a protest against the international meeting.
You would have to have your head in the sand to not consider the act of unleashing a virus as a possible act of warfare and in order to run tests to assess the viability of such an exercise, it would seem that the best way to test whether this is possible, would be to try it on humans.
Swine Flu has so far only been highly contagious in one city of the world. Most of the deaths occured in Mexico or a small number of people who had been to Mexico City. If you were running tests, you would of course not want your tests to accidentaly kill off a large percentage of the human race, you would want it to be in controlled environment, particularly one where your countries citizens were a vast minority.
It is common public knowledge that the US military does research into infectus diseases and according to The Frederick News, Fort Meade is investigating the possibility of missing virus samples fromthe U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. It doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination to consider wht the Army would have such an Institute. You could ligitimately suggest that they need this in case other countries or terrorist groups decide to engage in bio-warfare and of course in order to understand how to defend against such attacks you would of course have to know how to create the viruses.
The web is littered with sites like Freedom Watch saying that since 9/11 the US has been preparing for further terrorist attacks and that biological warfare would make a lot of sense. Many of these sites appear to be from civil liberty organisations and while many of them are based on reasonable foundations, there are obviously many that appear on the redneck fringe.
Nevertheless, this type of warfare of sorts has been documented for thousands of years, with the first known use of biotics was from 1500 – 1200 BC where Hittite texts suggested the use of ergot being used to deliberately contaminate water wells. Ergot was the same hallucinatory that is said to have been the foundation of the Salem witch trials, where the rye was contaminated causing LSD like hallucinations. So the concept is nothing new.
I spent quite a lot of time looking for any credible authority that suggests that there is any credibility to this possibility, but they all seem to quote Freedom Watch and similar sites as their source.
So was Swine Flu N1H1 man made? I doubt it. Is it possible, of course. Could a virus like this be mutated and used by terrorists or foreign governments as a military weapon, absolutely.
So back to the future. According to NZ Herald, the current list is now over 6,600 people in 33 countries, including over 70 deaths. The media in the US keeps saying they aren’t seriously concerned at the moment because summer is coming and the bacteria doesn’t survive for long in warm temperatures. Of course in New Zealand we are now heading into the flu season and there are currently around 400 people in isolation as I write this blog. A bit different to the bird flu we were worried about.
In one of my next blogs I will see what I can find out about the 2nd wave. Traditionally these sorts of viruses come back again in waves with the waves often having mutated and being far more virulent than the first and this is one of the problems for the makers of Tamiflu, because the antivirus they make now in massive quantities, might be powerless against the next wave of the bug. Will the 2nd wave start down under, or will it come in 4-5 months on the Amercian continent. Will we be ready for it?
While this 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.
Thanks so much for your support:)
For the last word, lets look inside a Mexican Swine Flu Isolation Ward.
As the Swine Flu progresses to Level 5 on the 6 point WHO Pandemic scale, in New Zealand they have decided to sell Tamiflu from Pharmacies to anyone that goes in and shows symptoms, without having to see a doctor. I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not, because it is likely that the majority of people who buy and use it won’t have the virus.
The biggest concern being expressed about this is that mass use of vaccines can encourage viruses to mutate and evolve into strains which resist vaccines and antibiotics. It seems to me that as it travels around the world it will evolve anyway, but why give it a helping hand. I just hope that there isn’t a rush on it so that people who do need it can’t get it. Tonight’s TV News did say that there was only a small increase in demand for Tamiflu.
It’s funny watching the news on CNN and other international (read American) TV channels, who seem to almost forget about New Zealand, because early on we were one of the countries that had early exposure in fairly large numbers. Even in the last couple of days, more people have gone into quarantine, now around 500, and we are now in a situation where we actually know people who are in quarantine. It’s no longer 6 points removed.
Mexico is obviously the place that is mostly in the news, and lets hope that their plans for a 5 day national shut down will help contain things until people are no longer contagious.
According to the Google Swine Flu map, the density of infection in the countries where they have confirmed cases, is growing fast. Spain is one of the biggest outside of the US and Mexico for obvious reasons. Switzerland and The Netherlands are the latest countries to get hit.
I was watching the news last night and they were saying that they were lucky that it is spring because viruses don’t spread as much when it is warm, but of course down here in New Zealand it is cooling down and we are heading into the flu season, so it could be potentially worse here.
Please participate in my poll. Do you know anyone who has been quarantined? It would be really interesting to see how this progresses. The feeling of it won’t happen to me may dissapear as we get to a point where we either know someone or are only 1 place removed.
While this 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.
So the story continues. It seems a long time ago (Monday of this week!) when I asked the question, Is the Swine Flu going to be a pandemic? Well on level 4 indicating a significant increased risk of a pandemic, a global outbreak of a serious disease. It isn’t yet a Pandemic, but it doesn’t show any signs of abating. As it appears that secondary transmission of human to human may now be occurring, a Reuters story says that they may soon raise to Level 5.
Another Reuters story also mentions that many countries have imposed a ban on US pork imports, this could lead to similar bans on pork exports from all countries where Swine Flu has been confirmed. This is despite WHO announcing that you can not catch A/N1H1 Swine Flu from eating pork, and in fact there is no evidence of pigs in Mexico or the USA being sick. There is conjecture that they may have captured the virus from Asian birds, possibly imported into Mexico, but the mystery is if the pigs aren’t sick, how is it that humans have caught it from them. It’s no wonder that conspiracy theories abound, while we have no real answers. A team of WHO specialists are now in Mexico trying to unravel this mystery.
On Tuesday I commented that Swine Flu is a bit close to home as New Zealand is one of the early significant areas where Swine Flu was strongly suspected to exist. This was confirmed yesterday and 360 odd passengers on Air New Zealand Flight 1 from Los Angeles were asked to quarantine themselves.
On Wednesday I blogged about how to get Swine Flu and within 24 hours most large corporates had emailed their staff with instructions about personal hygiene and how to minimise the risk of infection. Whether people are concerned or not is difficult to gauge and I suspect a lot of people are still thinking, this wil never happen to me. Despite this 2 hours ago the number of confirmed infected was increased to 14 and the suspect list includes an additional 56 people according to New Zealand’s TV3 News.
According to the Google Swine Flu Map the Kiwi’s affected are spread from Auckland in the North Island to Otago deep into the South Island. They of course had to use confined public transport to get there, so it is likely they may have spread the virus further.
One question I have is why have people died in Mexico but not in other countries. It also seems that the symptoms have been worse for people in Mexico. One theory is that it is attenuating as it spreads from one person to the other and weakening in the process. This could explain why the people in Mexico, including expats, have suffered far more than people in other countries, although this ios contraindicated by the fact that most if not all of those in New Zealand contracted the virus whilst personally in Mexico. There have been a very small number of people suspected to have Swine Flu who had not been to Mexico, but had been on flights together with people who have been confirmed as having Swine Flu. I have yet to hear of anyone who has been confirmed with the virus who were noton a flight with people who had been to Mexico or hadn’t been to Mexico themselves.
There are still some unsolved mysteries and it is the secondary nature of the spread of this virus that holds the greatest risk of a pandemic.
While this 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.
It was interesting to note that after my blog, Swine Flu is a bit close to home, where I pointed out that Air New Zealand were not telling the full story about how germs can spread on a plane by saying that the filters in their air conditioning system were very good at killing 99.9% of bugs and virus material, that there was a story in this morning’s NZ Herald, pointing out that even wearing a face mask only stops around 50% of contaminant material from entering the surrounding air. They also said that health officials are trying to track down the 367 passengers on the flight which brought the Kiwi students home after their trip to Mexico.
I can understand concerns within the airlines, because people contracting Swine Flu simply by contamination from fellow passengers could stop a lot of people from flying when they don’t have to which could be a commercial disaster.
Some time ago I wrote a blog called wash your hands after you do your business. On a 12 hour flight from Los Angeles to New Zealand, most people are likely to use the conveniences a couple of times during the flight. Several of them will not wash their hands after they have done their business and will then use the door handle to make their exit. The next person that comes along who does wash their hands, will find possibly end up with contamination from the previous user. Now they sit down and pick up their book or newspaper, lick their finger to wet it and turn the page, or finger a pen and put it in your mouth and guess what, they are now at risk from not one, but several people who had poor hygiene habits. That’s of course only one example. Maybe you shake hands with someone on the flight, or are sitting next to someone and you pass their tray from them to the cabin crew after they have had a meal. The opportunities are endless and the risks are many. There is no easy answer to this unfortunately.
Meanwhile if you have a look at the Google Swine Flu Map, you will see that it has now progressed to Sydney and since the flight that brought the Kiwi Students back arrived, there are now suspected outbreaks throughout NZ, confirming that no matter how good the ventilation system is on the plane, it can’t stop viruses from spreading.
While this 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.
Yesterday I posted a blog about Swine Flu, this is an interesting situation which will be at the forefront of many people’s minds for some time to come.
We live in interesting times. It seems analogous to the way banks have behaved since the ’89 meltdown when they said they would never be as free with their lending again, such as 100% mortgage loans. we relaxed after the Bird Flu fizzled out, but now we have a new strain N1H1 which apparently comes from pigs but is related to the bird flu. Whilst it appears that Tamiflu has a positive effect on this, there are of course no vaccines because it is new.
It was interesting to read in the NZ Herald this morning that Air New Zealand was saying that their aircraft are safe for fellow passengers because filters in the aircraft’s air conditioning system filter 99.9% of airborne viruses. Funny then how so many of us who travel on long haul flights end up coming down with some sort of virus within a short period of time after a flight.
Of course these filters require that you sneeze into them. A lot of people look into lights to help them sneeze (I must explore that sometime, or ifyou know why, please share the answer in a comment), but you lift your head to the light and then sneeze on the way down, creating a nice arc of germs.
So how fast does a sneeze travel through the air? Well according to the appropriately named site Blurtit, the fastest recorded sneeze was 102 Miles per hour! I would say that the germs from even an average 50MPH sneeze could travel a fair distance in an aircraft cabin.
Some more news from this morning’s NZ Herald was that the students that came back to Auckland after a school trip to mexico come from not one but 2 colleges, Rangititoto and Northcote College. The story also said that some of the kids who were ok when they arrived are now also showing symptoms. I wonder how many people they have been in contact with. The ones who are ill have been quarantined in their homes, but it didn’t say whether their sublings and parents were also quarantined or were going to their schools and workplaces.
What I find really interesting is the coincidence in the numbers. Greater Mexico City has a population of around 22 million people. 1300 reported people with Swine Flu is around 0.00005% of the population and yet a group of 20 odd Auckland kids have been exposed to it. It makes you wonder if the real number is far greater, but these are the only ones that they are prepared to announce. In a city of that size it must be spreading like wildfire.
There is of course already a Swine Flu Google Map, so you can keep an eye on how it spreads.
Is your household prepared for a pandemic?
Just as a footnote, if you have Sky TV, there is a movie called Doomsday on tonight, which is about a virus in Scotland, where they quarantine the whole country. I won’t be home to watch it, but its funny how its on TV tonight. I love coincidences.
While this 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.
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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