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Boston reports first swine-flu death
By adamg on Mon, 06/15/2009 - 2:37pm
A 30-year-old woman died of swine flu yesterday after more than a week in the hospital, city public-health officials announced today, adding that Boston is experiencing "a tremendous amount of H1N1 activity" - higher than any other city in the country save New York.
Boston Public Health Commission Director Barbara Ferrer emphasized that "the vast majority" of people who have come down with H1N1 have relatively mild cases. However, she said people should continue to take precautions, including washing their hands, covering their mouths when coughing and staying home for a week if they experience any flu-like symptoms. People with underlying health issues should contact their doctors immediately, she said.
Ferrer said the woman had some prior medical issues, but said officials are still investigating whether these contributed to her death. The woman was hospitalized on June 5. Dr. Anita Barry, director of communicable disease control for the city, said she had been sick for several days before being admitted to the hospital. She added officials as yet have no idea why Boston's swine-flu rate is so high.
To date, the city has shut 20 public and private schools because of abnormally high absences believed linked to flu cases.
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Comments
Maybe we need to smoke more?
Could be that Boston residents aren't smoking enough pot.
reason for genuine concern
The swine flu story has gone through so many peaks and valleys, we're now at a point where many are ignoring it, even after the WHO stamped the pandemic label on it.
But there are real concerns that this thing could go into overdrive in the fall, when the weather starts changing. Some large companies are quietly making contingency plans in the event that scads of their workers are out with the flu later this year.
And it's very possible that the current prevalence rate is considerably higher than what's reported.
I'm not sure I've seen a
I'm not sure I've seen a death case yet where the victim did not have a prior illness. I wish there was a way to know what illnesses these people had without breaking confidentiality.
false sense of security
I realized that I've let myself be lulled into that "prior illness" rap as well. The whole thing about flu fatalities being limited to folks who had prior illnesses, even if true, gives us such a false sense of security. Just about anyone can contract a disease or develop a condition that, say, weakens the immune system's ability to fight the flu virus.
Existing condition for seasonal flu deaths, too?
It's probably also the case that many of the 30,000-50,000 deaths each year attributed to the seasonal flu had pre-existing conditions, too.
The epidemiologists say that the fatality rate of the seasonal flu is somewhere around 0.1%. During the initial hysteria the experts said that the fatality rate was high with swine flu (in Mexico, at least). A month ago, they then lowered the fatality rate to be only "slightly higher than that seen with seasonal flu".
I wouldn't be surprised if the swine flu mortality rate was soon announced to be virtually identical with that seasonal flu. One death in Massachusetts out of 1,153 confirmed cases is 0.1%, though admittedly this is small number statistics. (What's on today's menu? The Poisson distribution.)
The real problem with Swine Flu
Despite being the past tense of "pigs fly" ...
There isn't a vaccine yet. While there is partial protection if you got one of the recent vaccines that had the H1N1 strain that went piggy - or had that flu - there is still a much higher risk to vulnerable people because there is no vaccine available.
The best strategy to protect vulnerable members of the population is vaccination. Unfortunately, we are SOL for the time being.