A medical voice from Mexico, via the BBC:
I'm a specialist doctor in respiratory diseases and intensive care at the Mexican National Institute of Health. There is a severe emergency over the swine flu here. More and more patients are being admitted to the intensive care unit. Despite the heroic efforts of all staff (doctors, nurses, specialists, etc) patients continue to inevitably die. The truth is that anti-viral treatments and vaccines are not expected to have any effect, even at high doses. It is a great fear among the staff. The infection risk is very high among the doctors and health staff.There is a sense of chaos in the other hospitals and we do not know what to do. Staff are starting to leave and many are opting to retire or apply for holidays. The truth is that mortality is even higher than what is being reported by the authorities, at least in the hospital where I work it. It is killing three to four patients daily, and it has been going on for more than three weeks. It is a shame and there is great fear here. Increasingly younger patients aged 20 to 30 years are dying before our helpless eyes and there is great sadness among health professionals here.
Antonio Chavez, Mexico City
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Swine flu has been ruled out in one of the L.A. deaths and is not suspected in the second.
I'm not impressed either. It's the flu. It is not the Black Death. It's the flu and the comparisons to 1919 are absurd. We don't do medicine by calling in the witch doctor to put on a mask and shake his rattle to cast out the disease devils, well maybe they still do in Louisiana, but in the civilized world it things are done differently.
Well - it was the flu in 1919 too. But given that they didnt have a lot of meds we have now - Charles is right - the comparisons are absurd.
I think that this could simply be the usual "yeah, the apocalypse" which so many seem to be looking forward too. I have been paying attention to the situation at St Francis Prep in NYC. The number of cases in NYC now has doubled, virtually all of them being exposed to the original 8 kids. The flu has also apparently spread to a public school for children with autisim, where one of the kids is a sibling of the original 8. Apparently though none of these people have been hospitalized. So - it seems to me while it is pretty contagious, it has not spread beyond those with fairly intimate contacts with the original 8 kids and no one seems seriously sick. Hopefully it stays that way.
Eat some raw garlic, wash your hands a lot, get plenty of sleep and go about your life.
Not to belittle those who are sick--I think this round of swine flu is a serious illness but I'm not one to go into quarantine to avoid exposure to the illness. I'll do what I can to minimize my chances of getting sick but otherwise I'll live my life.
BTW, my approach to avoiding all illnesses is to eat raw garlic every day or so, wash my hands (a lot) and avoid putting my hands around my nose and eyes, and get a good night's sleep every night.
So far, my strategy has worked very effectively for 7+ years (although I realize it's not magic and I could get sick at any time due to random circumstances).
The important thing to remember in contrasting the 1919 Spanish Influenza to this situation is that in 1919 there was no effective way to treat pneumonia. The witch doctor would listen to the chest with his stethoscope, determine that the pneumonia demon was present and calculate the time of death, which they were very good at. And that was all that he could do.
Now, why did that matter? Very simple. People did not die of the flu. They died of the pneumonia that was the result of the flu. We can treat pneumonia now. And that means that unless the patient has lungs that are severely damaged going in, such as a heavy smoker or someone who regularly breathes the air in Mexico City, the odds of being dangerously ill are pretty low.
Now, if we figure that for every reported case in the general population there are large number, possibly up to a thousand, unreported where folks just self medicate and throw it off in a day or two, the outbreak is probably far bigger than the numbers indicate and probably infinitely less serious.
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