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Swine Flu (H1N1/09)
The 2009 Pandemic Swine Flu, A-H1N1/09, the Type A influenza virus that was first identified in the early spring of 2009 in Mexico and then spread world wide to become a true Pandemic by June 2009. Different from other current seasonal strains of H1N1, and also not the same Swine Flu from prior epidemics or outbreaks (like in 1976), it is known by many different names in different places and settings, such as: H1N1, Novel H1N1, A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)v-like virus, la grippe porcine, The Mexican Flu, la epidemia, Schweinegrippe, and SOIV (Swine Origin Influenza Virus).
1,816 Questions
Tender armpits the day after getting flu shot in same arm?
The same happened to me! I got mine Oct 2012 and I feel terrible and have a really bad rash...I never get the flu so I never get the shot but I was required for a clinical and now I have bronchitis with bloody sputum, headache, and this terrible rash!!
Can you get the flu shot in your leg?
The thigh is sometimes used for infant immunizations, but not used for older patients.
Can you get Swine Flu from pig feces?
It is possible since the gastrointestinal system involves mucous tissue. In humans this is the tissue through which the virus usually enters the body. Any areas where infected pigs are kept can have virus particles on many things that you touch, and you won't have to actually touch the feces or the pig directly for you to get the virus on your hands. And then if you touch your mucous membranes in noses, mouths, and eyes you can become infected.
It is more often spread from the respiratory and sinus areas and their respiratory droplets from coughs and sneezes. Direct physical contact between the infected pig (or person) and vice versa by touching tears, saliva, or drainage from runny noses or where those fluids are sitting on the surfaces of objects and then touching eyes, nose, or mouths of the other is the way it is most often spread.
Additionally, pig feces could be a source of many other microbes including bacteria, so washing hands well after close contact with swine is very important.
What is the difference between N1H1 and H1N1?
MRSA is a bacteria (Staph A) that is resistant to the usual antibiotics and therefore hard to treat when it causes an infection. H1N1 is a virus that can cause influenza, like swine flu.
Both can be severe infections that require hospitalization and intensive treatment measures.
Is a child of 11 at high risk if they have swine flu?
Very probably not. It depends on how sick you get and if you have any underlying illnesses, especially those that affect the lungs (like asthma) and diseases of the immune system. The most common deaths are in the age groups of those 5 and under (due to their immature immune systems and difficulty remaining hydrated when fighting infections), and those 30 to 50 years old with chronic underlying diseases like diabetes or disorders of the lungs or cardiovascular system.
In all, the odds of anyone dying from it are very low. See the related question about the percentage of people who die from swine flu.
At what temperature does the flu virus die?
It is unknown the body temperature that kills the flu. However, the reason the flu is has been so prevalent this fall is because we did not have a typical hot summer. For the destruction of the swine and seasonal flu's we need to have a span of 85-plus degree days in the summer for 10-14 days. This is said to have killed the virus in the past.
How many people overcame the Swine Flu?
There may still be some ongoing cases in limited locations around the world. However, the specifics and counts of cases are no longer being tracked by CDC, WHO, the US states, and most other countries, now that the pandemic has been declared over. Influenza cases are monitored, but specific H1N1/09 counts (and the lab tests needed to isolate the specific virus to be able to count them correctly) aren't being done. Influenza cases in general are monitored, but statistics are not being kept for H1N1/09 cases separately from other influenza types for reporting any longer in the post pandemic phase.
Alot of people have got the swine. Ill right how many people in countries have got the swine flu:
Countires: How much people have got the Swine Flu:
Mexico 7,847 United States 22,847 Canada 6,457 Argentina 1,213 Chile 4,315 Australia 2,733 Dominican Republic 99 Colombia 71 United Kingdom 2,773 Philippines 445 Guatemala 235 Costa Rica 189 Honduras 118 Japan 892 Thailand 774 Spain 537 Other 5,073
How long do you stay indoors if you have swine flu?
If you feel good enough to go outside and the weather is comfortable, as long as you continue to keep safely away (6 ft diameter) from others to avoid giving them the flu, and clean surfaces with antiseptics after being there if others will use the area, there is no reason you could not rest outside as easily as inside in most circumstances. Avoid being in the direct sun and also keep in mind that activities outside or inside should be limited so you get the proper rest your body needs to be able to fight the virus. You really do need to rest when you have the flu.
If you are asking how long you would be contagious to others if you went out in public, then while you are still symptomatic you should take full precautions (as should others in your presence) to avoid contamination until you have gone a full 24 hours (without interruption) with no fever when measured with a thermometer. Until that time, you should continue to consider yourself able to pass the infection to others. This is according to guidelines from the CDC.
What is the effect of influenza AH1N1?
H1N1/09 (referred to as "swine flu" early on) is a new influenza virus causing illness in people. This new virus was first detected in people in Mexico in April 2009. Other countries, including the US and Canada, have reported people sick with this new virus. This virus is spreading from person-to-person, in the same way that regular seasonal influenza viruses spread.
See the related questions below for more about swine flu and the meaning of A-H1N1/09 "swine flu".
What is the common name of H1N1?
H5N1, commonly called "Bird flu" is a strain of avian flu (the types of flu that birds get). Normally, it's not a threat to humans and is carried by birds who give it to other birds. However, this strain has now mutated and spread to both wild and domesticated birds, and has begun spreading to mammals such as pigs. Humans and other mammals have been infected with the flu by direct contact with the infected birds or their saliva or feces. There have been a few very very rare cases of human to human transmission when an infected person lived closely with another person.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) web pages: Avian influenza ("bird flu") is an infectious disease of birds caused by type A strains of the influenza virus. The infection can cause a wide spectrum of symptoms in birds, ranging from mild illness, which may pass unnoticed, to a rapidly fatal disease that can cause severe epidemics.
Avian influenza viruses do not normally infect humans. However, there have been instances of certain highly pathogenic strains causing severe respiratory disease in humans. In most cases, the people infected had been in close contact with infected poultry or with objects contaminated by their feces. Nevertheless, there is concern that the virus could mutate to become more easily transmissible between humans, raising the possibility of an influenza pandemic.
More:
The bird flu, or Avian Influenza, is a potentially deadly sickness that can be transferred from infected birds to people. So far, there have not been as many deaths from it as from other strains of influenza viruses in people, but due to the vast number of poultry farms in places such as India and China where people and birds are often living very close together, the potential threat is great for even pandemic proportions of related illness.
The highly pathogenic Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 is only one subtype of avian influenza-causing virus.
A current worry by public health organizations world wide is that this very aggressive virus will mutate making it more easily transmissible to humans. With the swine flu (A-H1N1/09) from the 2009 pandemic, which is a highly contagious flu virus in humans, there is always concern that it could combine with H5N1 to a mutated reassortant strain that would have the easy transmission of H1N1 and the severity of symptoms and death of H5N1.
While a pandemic is possible at any time, keep in mind that the human toll from widespread outbreaks are lessened with each outbreak, thanks to better understanding of disease and progressive research and medical breakthrough.
The US government has set up a very good website explaining flu viruses and what we can do collectively and individually to protect ourselves and others from their spread.
See the link to this site in the related links section below.
On the lighter side:
Bird flu is when birds fly in the past tense.
True or false the flu is spread only by direct contact such as kissing a person with the flu?
FALSE because contact can also occur indirectly. A common form of indirect contact is inhaling the tiny drops of moisture that an infected person sneezes or coughs into the air. These drops of moisture may contain disease-causing organisms such as flue or cold viruses.
CREDITS FROM: NORTH CAROLINA 8TH GRADE PRENTICE HALL SCIENCE EXPLORER
Can or should you still get the vaccine if you have already had the Swine Flu?
Yes.
For the 2010-2011 flu season in the Northern Hemisphere, the seasonal flu vaccination will include the vaccine for H1N1 (Swine Flu) along with the two other flu viruses that are anticipated to be prevalent this year. So only one flu vaccination is needed for this flu season.
You can still take it even if you had the H1N1/09 flu vaccination last year or if you had the flu last year. It will not hurt to get it again and it will be the most recent strain of that virus, so in case the one you had was slightly different, this one will protect you from it, too.
What should you do if one of your employees has Swine Flu?
If you have come into contact with someone with Swine Flu and your are starting to shwo symtomns then I suggest you quarantine yourself and try not to mix with anyone for a week. Stay at home, drink plenty of fluids and enjoy the time off! It wont kill you! it is the same as any other flu virus really
Why does the flu vaccine developed each year not always work?
The flu vaccine is not a new vaccine that is developed from scratch every year. The flu virus mutates rapidly into different strains, meaning that a vaccination from a previous year will not protect you for another year's strain. The vaccine is modified to take account of this - it is not developed from scratch every time.
Swine flu is a potentially dangerous form of the influenza virus, but it is not clear how bad the pandemic might get. Swine flu spreads quickly through populations - which is what gives it the pandemic status - but does not seem to have a particularly high mortality rate. It's likely that a large number of people will become infected with the current strain and suffer some bad flu symptoms, but not so likely that this will translate into a major public health issue. The swine flu can have as little harm as the regular flu or it could get so bad that you would need to go intohospitalization. However, this normally only happens if you have health problems to begin with. They also just came out with a new vaccine for it, so that should lower the rating of how bad it is.
How to reduce the spread of H1N1?
Prevention is the best medicine. Get a vaccination and if everyone who can does, the virus will be without hosts and will eventually die off.
Otherwise, you control it through good hygiene, hand washing, avoiding being in contact with others while you are ill and clean commonly used public surfaces or items regularly with disinfectants effective on viruses.
What makes the flu virus so hard to fight?
As infectious diseases go, it is not that hard for the body to fight and the immune system can usually fight it within 7 to 10 days. Sometimes two weeks, like in some people with H1N1, but a normal healthy person with a healthy immune system can fight a flu virus faster than it can fight a bacterial infection in many cases, especially without other treatment like antibiotics to help.
The flu virus is hard to fight with any medications, which is the opposite of most bacterial infections. There are not many medications for treating the flu and there are no medicines that "kill" the virus outright like antibiotics that we have to kill bacteria.
Viruses are able to mutate rapidly and make little changes to their shape, protein coatings and other things to help them avoid the defenses the body may have developed to it before the mutation. The body must start all over again to build immunity to the newest mutation. This makes it so that more and more "new" viruses are developing all the time that we have to one by one fight and create antibodies for protection against. This "getting-around-our-immune-systems" defense" is how viruses continue to infect and replicate even after we have inactivated a prior version of the virus with our antibodies.
Did the current strain of Swine Flu start in a pig?
It is not from swine, never was, never will. It merely RESEMBLES what swine have. There aren't any proven cases that it was transmitted from a pig or anything to a human being.
Source: http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/qa.htm
Can you take a flu shot after Z pak?
There are no listed drug interactions or contraindications in taking that antibiotic or others at or around the same time as having a flu vaccination.
However, depending on why you are taking an antibiotic, it may or may not be a good idea in your case. If you have an active bacterial infection (what Z pak is used for), then it may be better to wait until your immune system has overcome that problem before giving it a new problem to deal with in responding with immunity to a viral infection at the same time. If you have fever from your bacterial infection or other symptoms of acute bacterial infections, you should wait until the fever is gone before getting a flu shot.
Your best decision for your situation can be made with the assistance and advice of the doctor who has prescribed the antibiotics.
When is a person with H1N1 flu contagious?
If someone in your home has swine flu, your odds of catching it are about one in eight, although children are twice as susceptible as adults, the study found. It is one of the first big scientific attempts to find out how much the illness spreads in homes versus at work or school, and who is most at risk.
The study was done by outbreak specialists from Imperial College London and from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Results are in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
Swine flu has sickened an estimated one-sixth of Americans since the novel virus was first identified in April. The second wave of cases now seems to have peaked, and health experts do not know if another surge lies ahead.
People with swine flu are advised to stay home for at least a day after their fever goes away by itself to avoid spreading illness. That puts family members at risk, but who is vulnerable and to what extent has not been known.
60 percent of cases are kids
About 60 percent of swine flu cases have been in children, but researchers wondered: are they truly more likely to get swine flu, or just more likely to be taken to a doctor and tested for it? Are they more likely to spread the virus than adults are?
To find out, researchers studied infection patterns in 216 people with swine flu from around the United States (half of them children) and 600 people living wiRespiratory illnesses that researchers assumed were swine flu developed in 78 of the 600 household members, or 13 percent. However, 10 percent had symptoms more specific to flu.
That's less than the "spread" rate during earlier flu pandemics in 1957 and 1968, when 14 percent to 20 percent of household members were infected. Less is known about spread in the 1918 pandemic, but households and lifestyles were very different then. In an ordinary flu season, the virus spreads to 5 percent to 40 percent of household members, various studies have shown.
Children were twice as susceptible to catching swine flu as adults were, and even more so if they were younger than 4, said one of the researchers, Lyn Finelli, surveillance chief for the CDC's flu division.
"It fits with what I'm seeing clinically," said Dr. James King, chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians' board of directors and a family medicine doctor in Selmer in western Tennessee. "Most of the people I'm seeing are people under 20, mostly kids," he said.
Nearly three-fourths of households in the study managed to avoid spreading the illness to any family members.
In homes where the germ was transmitted, researchers found something unexpected: "People at all ages were just as likely to spread the virus," Finelli said. "That was surprising, since we always think of kids as super-spreaders."
The study was funded by several public and private health-related groups in England and the United States, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Why is the flu so prevalent at certain times of the year?
Influenza spreads so rapidly during winter because of the drier air. The body's mucus is then dehydrated. The body's mucus is then not able to properly expelling the virus.
Another reason is because people are inside more often and this promotes transmission from person to person.
Also the virus survives longer on hard surfaces in cold temperatures.
I hope this helps.
Like other influenza viruses, it attacks the respiratory system. It causes the tissues to become inflamed and actually enters some of the cells of the host animal to cause them to reproduce the virus and stop working for the host. Then as the replicated virus particles are released from inside the cell, they split open the cell to get out and the cell is killed in the process.
The most harmful condition it can cause in an otherwise healthy adult, is secondary pneumonia which can be a critical condition. Also when too many cells are infected and killed, the body must recover from the loss of function of those cells. There can be stress on the kidneys trying to rid the body of the dead cells and excess proteins and other by-products of the infectious disease. Secondary infections such as bacterial or viral pneumonia can result in respiratory failure, septicemia (infection in the blood and whole body), and even death. Many worse problems can occur in those at higher risk for complications with underlying disease, etc. [see more on that in related questions below]
Luckily, the new virus was a relatively mild infection for most people, so the death rate was lower than initially feared by epidemiologists.
Do you have to clean your hands every day?
yes you do have to clean your hands everyday or you are going to get swine flu.look on the internet to find more info in swine flu hey one more thing remember you can catch swine flu if you dont wash your hands everyday
