Swine Flu news and updates thread

Two common anti-influenza drugs — Relenza and Tamiflu — appear equally effective at preventing common flu symptoms when given before infection, say researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine. However, data is lacking on the effectiveness and safety of the two drugs in vulnerable groups such as the very young and people with compromised immune systems. www.healthnewsdigest.com...

Ramallah - The first Palestinian died of swine flu in the West Bank Friday afternoon, a senior Palestinian official said.

Dr. Fathi Abu Mghalli, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) Minister of Health, said in a statement sent to reporters the victim was a resident of the Ramallah area. www.monstersandcritics.com...

Nurses in California protested last week at what they claim are inadequate hospital safety precautions against swine flu, following the death of a colleague.

More than 100 nurses attended a rally in San Francisco protesting at the lack of safety preparation for the flu pandemic in California hospitals.

The protest, organised by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, follows the death of a 51-year-old nurse who worked at a Sacramento hospital from swine flu at the end of July.

The two organisations claim hospitals in California are not adequately prepared to protect their nurses from infection. A survey of their members has uncovered ‘systemic problems with safety gear for nurses and infection control procedures for patients, as well as an emerging pattern of retribution against nurses who speak out about unsafe care’, they said.

Deborah Burger, co-president of the two organisations, said: ‘Hospitals across California – and possibly the entire country – are putting registered nurses and other front-line caregivers at risk by inadequately preparing for this pandemic.

‘If hospitals do not take urgent precautions to reverse this lack of preparation, we may see our health care facilities become vectors for infections. That is especially worrisome for hospital patients who already have compromised immune systems, and our nurses who may be unable to respond because of their own sickness’, said Ms Burger. www.nursingtimes.net...

The NHS has begun approaching retired doctors, nurses and other staff to work if the swine flu pandemic gets worse.

Some employers are contacting staff who left up to three years ago while others have set a limit of one year.

Five trusts asked by Nursing Times’ sister publication Health Service Journal said they had started approaching former staff, suggesting that many more trusts across the country may be taking the same action.

NHS East Sussex Downs and Weald and NHS Hastings and Rother said that together they had sent letters about helping to tackle the swine flu pandemic to 60 people who had retired in the past year, and received 10 agreements.

North Somerset PCT has 23 agreements from nursing and administrative staff who retired within the past two years. Brent PCT has approached 55 retirees from the past three years and has had 15 agreements.

One acute trust, University Hospitals of Leicester, said it had identified around 90 clinicians, including nurses, doctors, physiotherapists and radiographers of up to two years’ retirement.

King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said it was not approaching retired staff. Some employees were being trained to take on other roles. If necessary it would close elective services and transfer staff to urgent work. www.nursingtimes.net...

HANOI, Vietnam - All schools in Hanoi closed Friday in a bid to contain an outbreak of swine flu that has killed one person and infected more than 1,000 in Vietnam, the city's education authority said.

The Hanoi Education and Training Department said it had asked all schools in Vietnam's capital not to open until further notice, in order to prevent the spread of the A(H1N1) virus, which causes swine flu.

The new school year will start on August 17, but schools have started convening students since the beginning of this week.

In Hanoi, three schools have recorded A(H1N1) infections among their students, according to the education department's online report.

Vietnam reported its first A(H1N1) infection in late May. Since then, 1,043 cases of infection have been reported, with 608 discharged from hospital.

The country's first death from a swine flu was a 29-year-old woman who died Monday in Khanh Hoa coastal province. --AFP

JERUSALEM, Aug. 7 (Xinhua) -- A middle-aged A/H1N1 patient died in Jerusalem on Thursday night, marking the fifth death case of the global pandemic in Israel, local news service Ynet reported Friday.

The victim, in his 50s, who also suffered from other illnesses, died from complications caused by A/H1N1 flu, the report quoted the Health Ministry as saying, adding that he had been hospitalized in Jerusalem for about a week.

On Thursday, the Health Ministry changed its policy for counting the victims of the A/H1N1 virus, adding the cases in which the virus cannot be completely ruled out as the cause of death, reported local daily The Jerusalem Post.

As a result, the death of a 44-year-old male A/H1N1 flu patient last week in Tel Aviv was added to the list, which already included a 24-year-old woman, a 35-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl, said the report.

Israeli health experts have warned that some one quarter of the Israeli population would contract the virus during a possible outbreak this winter, among whom around 700 would die.

The Israeli government pledged to purchase a large amount of vaccines for precaution.

sorry dude but give it a rest

2nd line

On Friday Spain reported a drastic increase in the number of H1N1 cases, witih 12,270 new infections compared to 1,538 reported up until July 23. The increase is the result of applying a new method of detecting the illness.The new system, which follows recommendations from WHO, is based on a network of sentinel doctors who are monitoring the evolution of the illness and who can see the tendency of the infection by confirming some cases, according to the Ministry of Health.Following the new methodology, according to a news release, between July 27 and August 2, Spain saw 36.04 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, which permits a calculation that in this period 16,105 persons have fallen ill.

people around the world dont know the TRUTH about the Swine Flu!!!!
it is not about vaccine at all it is the same virus which will kill huge part of the WESTERN WORLD in the next 3 years and no vaccine will stop it and people dont know who really created that virus - RUSSIANS created it to give the final hit on the western civilization! All people around the world are blind to see that there are practically no cases of Swine Flu in Russia neither in the surrounding soviet republics like Belarus, Armenia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China and few others..which have NO CASES practically if we exclude very few isolated cases in those countries and COMPARE the very few cases in all those RUSSIA-CHINA surrounding area and you will see that it is NOTHING compared to the milliones and even billions of people who live there!!!!!!!!!! How is possible there are no people traveling from the terrible infected already rest of the world (mainly the Western Civilization World) and there is no spread of the virus in RUSSIA and all those ex-soviet areas plus China??????????????????? While thousends of people are getting infected daily in all even remote places of the Western Kind of the World even in those remote and hardly visited islands as Kiribati Tuvalu Palau or Tonga!!!!!!!!!!!!! But no cases really in Russia Belarussia Ukraine Armenia Mongollia plus China.
World is blind to not see who are the guilty ones not only for the Swine Flu Pandemic but for the World Economic Crisis too! The same countries dont feel any economic crisis in fact and if they say they do they are just LYING to throw away any suspicions about them and their conspiracy to destroy the Western Civilization once and forever. Please SPREAD THE WORD so every single western person wakes up and all together stop the RUSSIAN-CHINESE greatest conspiracy to destroy us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

reply to post by huntergatherer


Here is a good one line post , no

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug. 7 (Xinhua) -- Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Friday that Influenza A/H1N1 had become a serious threat to the nation.

The prime minister also advised the people to take precautions measures to prevent the spread of the virus, the Malaysian news agency Bernama reported.

This included not attending unnecessary gatherings as gathering would only expose the participants to additional risk of contracting the virus, Najib said.

According to the Malaysia Health Ministry website, as of 8 a.m. Friday, Malaysia recorded 15 fatalities of the disease and the total cases of the flu had risen to 1,525.

Najib said at a press conference after opening the Malaysian Sports Industry convention here that personal hygiene must be maintained at all times, reminding people of taking preventive measures like washing hands and wearing masks.

On the other hand, Malaysia Information, Communications, Arts and Culture Minister Rais Yatim said that his colleague from the Health Ministry could disseminate information on the disease via relevant advertisements.

He said in a press conference on the country's national day celebration that when preparing for the celebration, public health issues would not be ignored.

The flu should not be a hindrance to celebrate Malaysia's National Day as long as proper approaches were executed, added Rais news.xinhuanet.com...

LA PAZ – A doctor has died from the AH1N1 flu virus, raising the death toll from the disease in Bolivia to 12, the Health Ministry said.

The physician was treated for more than three weeks but did not recover, health officials said.

The doctor died in La Paz, but she caught the flu while treating patients at a hospital in the Andean city of Oruro, Health Ministry epidemiology director Eddy Martinez told Efe.

The physician was taken from Oruro to La Paz on July 16 for treatment, Martinez said, adding that she might not have sought medical care in time and the case was under investigation.

“We have to see what happened, but it was obviously something that concerns us a lot because it deals with a health worker,” Martinez said.

Two other deaths in La Paz and Santa Cruz are being investigated to determine if they were due to influenza.

A total of 953 people have been infected with the AH1N1 flu virus, according to the latest Health Ministry figures, with 652 of the cases reported in the eastern province of Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz has accounted for some 69 percent of the total AH1N1 flu cases. vur.me...

The legal adviser in the Saudi ministry of justice has reassured Muslims that whoever dies of the swine flu will get the reward of a 'martyr'.

In an interview with the Okaz daily newspaper, Sheikh Muhsin al-Ubaikan said the spread of swine flu as a pandemic is tantamount to plague.

The senior Saudi legal scholar referred to what he said was a saying by Prophet Mohammed that can be explained to mean that plague victims are martyrs www.presstv.ir...

reply to post by wakeuppls


Russia confirms 35 A/H1N1 flu cases

news.xinhuanet.com...

MOSCOW, July 30 (Xinhua) -- Russia has confirmed 35 A/H1N1 flu cases, the country's chief sanitary official Gennady Onishchenko said on Thursday.

Hong Kong reports 234 new influenza A/H1N1 cases

news.xinhuanet.com...

HONG KONG, Aug. 7 (Xinhua) -- Hong Kong confirmed 234 new cases of influenza A/H1N1 Friday, bringing the total to 5,208 in the region, local health authorities said.

The recent outbreak of swine flu at an Australian piggery has raised questions over whether this will cause the virus to mutate and become more deadly.

The farm, located near Dunedoo, central-western New South Wales, has been placed in quarantine following the announcement on Friday that its pigs had become the first in Australia to catch swine flu, probably from farm workers.

Last night representatives from state, territory and Commonwealth agriculture and primary industries departments, and the pig industry, met to endorse a plan to contain the virus and eradicate it from the pigs.

In recent days some experts have expressed concern about the virus mutating in pigs and being passed back to humans in a more dangerous form. But officials have been urging people not to worry. ow.ly...

Deaths from swine flu in Peru have risen to 40, while the number of confirmed cases has risen to 5,304, according the the ministry of health.In a news release, the ministry announced the deaths in Lima of a little girl of 3, and two adult women, and of another woman who died in the southern city of Arequipa.As well, the ministry said that the number of cases of the disease have risen by 164 in the last 24 hours.

An unprecedented run on the antiviral medication Tamiflu in WA because of a spike in swine flu cases has left pharmacies without stock for days at a time.

Some patients say that despite getting a script from their doctor, they have battled to find a chemist that has the drug, particularly the child dosage.

Antivirals need to be taken within 48 hours of developing the first flu-like symptoms to reduce the severity of illness effectively and improve recovery time. www.thewest.com.au...

Early in may we found that swine flu was two infections the first and then another about 20 days later now they want to give us 2 vaccines 21 days apart. www.washingtonpost.com...

The NHS swine-flu hot line is employing 16-year-olds to assess suspected cases of the potentially deadly virus. www.telegraph.co.uk...

reply to post by wakeuppls


You'll need to use less than one hundred exclamation points for me to take your babble seriously. And less caps too, please. Where is your proof of this sinister Russian plan? Oh.. you don't have any, do you. Big surprise there. Post proof, if you have it.