5 ms·

This has been an interesting turnabout in H1N1 news. I first started following it closely in the first days of its outbreak, because my girlfriend happened to b

This has been an interesting turnabout in H1N1 news. I first started following it closely in the first days of its outbreak, because my girlfriend happened to be visiting family just outside Mexico City at the time. Initial reports said that one of the main concerns of H1N1, over "normal" influenza strains, was that it seemed to have a greater effect on those with healthy immune systems. At the time, there were some guesses that it might be triggering cytokine "storms". Since then, this has been subtly altered to the usual "most dangerous to the less healthy" property of normal influenza. I don't really have a point, it's just an observation that's made me go, "huh."

cperciva 17y ago
Influenza causes death through two primary routes: 1. Cytokine storm causing respiratory failure; 2. Increasing the vulnerability of the respiratory tract to secondary infections. Route #1 is generally how healthy individuals (including the high-risk group of late-term pregnant women) die, while route #2 is generally how unhealthy individuals (people with weakened immune systems; people with existing respiratory conditions; the elderly) die. My understanding is that H1N1 is not causing significantly more deaths through route #1 than seasonal influenza, and that the early indications to that effect were due to (a) Mexican health authorities only identifying the most severe H1N1 cases (this is also why Mexico had a much higher reported death rate than the rest of the world), and (b) the elderly being resistant to H1N1 due to its similarity to the 1957 pandemic influenza. In short: Pandemics are complicated, and sometimes circumstances conspire to mislead researchers.