Health Tips:Swine Flu Outbreak Intensifies

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HEALTH TIP: Swine Flu Outbreak Intensifies

In response to the intensifying outbreak, the WHO raised the global threat to a Phase 5, the second-highest on the scale indicating wide spread human-to-human transmission, but the agency is concerned the virus may be moving into another phase. In Spain, nine infected people had returned from Mexico, but in one case, the virus was transmitted from person- to-person within the community. If Spain continues to see more cases of community transmission, the pandemic alert may have to be raised to Phase 6, the highest level. “The significance is that it’s another phase,” said WHO spokesman Dick Thompson. “The virus is becoming established in another area, another country.” But he added that the virus would have to show a sustained pattern of transmission for the level to be raised. “We’re looking for intergenerational spread. So, that means from a traveler to a spouse to the butcher to the kindergarten, something like that—through generations of spread in one community.”

The U.S. government has declared a public health emergency. “Every American should know that the federal government is prepared to do whatever is necessary to control the impact of this virus,” President Barack Obama said, highlighting his request for .5 billion in emergency funding for vaccines. Eight states closed schools Wednesday, and Obama called on all schools with confirmed or possible swine flu cases to consider closing temporarily. At a news conference on Wednesday night, the President also stressed that “individual families (need to) start taking very sensible precautions.” His advice: “Wash your hands when you shake hands, cover your mouth when you cough. I know it sounds trivial, but it makes a huge difference. If you are sick, stay home. If your child is sick, keep them out of school.”

Mexico, where the flu is suspected of killing more than 150 people and sickening over 2,400, has already closed schools nationwide until at least May 6 and has closed all nonessential government offices and private businesses from May 1-5. They have also mandated restaurants to serve takeout only and ordered a shutdown of about 35,000 public venues. However, essential services like transport, supermarkets, trash collection, and hospitals will remain open. In a television broadcast late Wednesday night, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said the country has enough medicine to cure the ill. “In times of difficulty, we’ve always come together,” he said. “Together we will overcome this disease.”

U.S. officials have not issued specific travel restrictions but have advised against nonessential travel to Mexico. However, other countries including Argentina, Cuba and Ecuador, have banned travel to or from Mexico and South Korea has designated Mexico a “travel restricted area,” urging citizens to delay or cancel trips there. Asia has tightened its already stringent screenings at airports and transport hubs and Australia has introduced new “precautionary” measures ranging from disinfecting aircraft after they arrive from overseas to isolating and detaining suspected sufferers of the disease. “It means that we can act nationally, we can act quickly,” Health Minister Nicola Roxon told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “(We can make) sure that people are isolated and perhaps detained if they don’t cooperate and are showing symptoms.”

Hong Kong authorities have made the illness a “notifiable disease”, meaning anyone who has come into contact with a suspected patient can now be quarantined and most countries in the region have increased airport checks to screen passengers arriving from affected areas and advised against nonessential travel to Mexico. France’s health Minister, Roselyne Bachelot said she would ask the European Union to suspend all flights to Mexico at a Thursday meeting in Luxembourg. And in Germany, Lufthansa announced that beginning Thursday it will put a doctor aboard all flights to Mexico.

Experts say that having a doctor aboard flights makes sense, as they will be able to answer questions and tend to passengers who might fall ill and the WHO said closing schools and public places, as well as banning or restricting mass gatherings, can be a way to contain the spread of the virus. “That’s a technique we would be recommending in a pandemic,” said Thompson. “We would recommend it to nations as a useful technique to be applied given the special circumstances of each nation.”

However, total bans on travel are questionable because the virus is already widespread. “WHO does not recommend closing of borders and does not recommend restrictions of travel,” said Dr. Fukuda. “From an international perspective, closing borders or restricting travel would have very little effect, if any effect at all, at stopping the movement of this virus.” During the 2003 SARS outbreak in Asia, travel bans were effective because that illness is transmitted only by people who already show symptoms. Contrastingly, the flu has an incubation period of between 24 hours and four days, which means it can spread even before symptoms appear.

And the slaughtering of pigs, as Egypt began doing Wednesday, or banning importation of pork, like China, Russia and Ukraine have done, will not help either. The WHO says that, unlike bird flu where officials worried about people’s exposure to infected birds, there is no similar concern about pigs and no evidence that people have contracted swine flu by eating pork or handling pigs. “There is no association that we’ve found between pigs and the disease in humans,” Dick Thompson said. Pork producers are trying to get people to stop calling the disease swine flu, and President Obama referred to it Wednesday only by its scientific name, H1N1.

Though Mexico is being called the epicenter of the outbreak, investigators have yet to determine where it actually began. Mexico’s chief epidemiologist, Miguel Angel Lezana, suggested that someone could have brought the disease from Pakistan or Bangladesh. He said one of the eight deaths in Mexico attributed to the flu was a Bangladeshi immigrant who had lived in Mexico for six months and was recently visited by a brother who arrived from Bangladesh or Pakistan and was reportedly ill. Lezana said the brother has since left Mexico and his whereabouts are unknown.

If you plan to travel internationally, be sure to check with the airport or cruise line for information about their procedures during the outbreak; how they are handling rescheduling, rerouting and refunds for example. The LA Times Travel Deal Blog offers seven important tips that are helfpul for travelers. You can also access a swine flu health map here. ___________________________________________________

Countries adopt plans to counter swine flu

GENEVA, Switzerland — Countries worldwide are taking pre- cautions to prevent the swine flu outbreak from crossing their borders, the World Health Organization in Geneva said. WHO officials said they will decide Tuesday whether to raise the pandemic alert level, CNN reported Monday. The health organization, after an emergency meeting during the weekend, urged countries to watch out for “unusual” outbreaks of the flu that so far had been blamed for 103 deaths in Mexico. Officials distributed 4 million filter masks in Mexico City, closed schools and universities until further notice, and are considering shutting down public transportation systems. People are asked to avoid large crowds, refrain from kissing and keep a personal space of at least 6 feet. The World Bank is offering 5 million to deal with the outbreak, CNN re- ported. China has banned pork imports from Mexico, as well as from California, Kansas and Texas in the United States. Russia has banned all meat imports from Mexico and the south- ern United States. In New Zealand, 25 people who returned from a language trip to Mexico were quarantined while the World Health Organization determines whether they have swine flu. Officials also asked New Zealanders who traveled to Mexico or North America during the past two weeks to contact health officials if they begin experiencing flu-like symp- toms. Some countries have issued travel notices, but other countries said officials will meet to determine what, if any, action needs to be taken, CNN reported. ___________________________________________________

U.S. faces growing doctor shortages

WASHINGTON — The United States is facing a shortage of pri- mary care physicians just as they’re needed most to treat people who gain new benefits, lawmakers say. Healthcare re- form proposals being advanced by U.S. President Barack Obama would provide insurance to millions who don’t have coverage, which could make a growing shortage of primary care physic- ians much more serious, The New York Times reported Monday. “We don’t have enough doctors in primary care or in any spec- ialty,” said U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, added, “The (doctor) workforce shortage is reaching crisis proportions.” Efforts to raise Medicare payments to primary care doctors to encourage more people to take up such practices are being opposed in Congress by lobbyists representing specialists, who say the increases would come at their expense. They instead advocate increasing the overall pool of Medicare money, but that idea comes at a time of ballooning deficit spending, the newspaper said. The Obama administration wants to add more primary care doctors by increasing medical school enrollment; giving more work to physician assistants and nurse practitioners, and expanding a program that sends health professionals to rural areas and urban neighborhoods, the Times reported.

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At least 112 swine flu cases worldwide

GENEVA, Switzerland — The number of suspected and confirmed cases of swine flu worldwide rose as the United States repor- ted its first swine flu-related death Wednesday. The outbreak in Mexico was suspected in 159 deaths and more than 2,500 illnesses by early Wednesday, CNN reported. The World Health Organization, based in Geneva, reported at least 112 cases have been confirmed worldwide. A 2-year-old Texas child be- came the first U.S. victim of swine flu, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said. Health officials in Mexico said seven deaths from the virus were confirmed. The WHO listing of confirmed cases includes 64 from the United States, 26 from Mexico, six in Canada, three in New Zealand, and two each in Spain, Britain and Israel. The WHO statis- tics do not include 11 additional cases reported by New Zealand health officials, three by German officials or one confirmed by Costa Rica’s health ministry. In the United States, California, Indiana, Illinois, New York and Texas also reported additional cases not confirmed by the CDC.

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Re-awakened old genes help fight HIV

ORLANDO, Fla. — University of Central Florida scientists say they have developed a vaginal cream containing a re- awakened protein that might prevent the transmission of HIV. Assistant Professor Alexander Cole, who led the study, said his team revived a dormant gene found in humans and coaxed it to produce retrocyclin, a protein that resists the human immunodeficiency virus. Cole said aminoglycosides — drugs commonly used to fight bacterial infections — were used to trigger the production of the sleeping protein expressed by the retrocyclin gene. “It could make a huge difference in the fight against HIV,” Cole said. “Much more work would be needed to demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of this approach. We would certainly have to have human trials, but these findings represent a promising step in that direction.” HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. The disease, most often transmitted sexually, affects 4.3 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. The findings from the three-year investigation appear in the journal PLoS Biology.

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Scientists determine mimivirus structure

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — U.S.-led scientists say they have determined the key structural features of the mimivirus – the largest virus known to scientists. The researchers said the mimivirus is more than 10 times larger than the virus that causes the common cold and, unlike other viruses, is large enough to be seen with a light microscope. The mimivirus infects amoebas, but also might act as a human pathogen, since antibodies to the virus have been discovered in people with pneumonia. However, many details about the virus remain unknown, said Purdue University Professor Michael Rossmann. Rossmann and a team of researchers from the University of California-Irvine and the University of the Mediterranean in Marseilles, France, have determined the basic design of the virus’s outer shell. “The findings are important in terms of studying the evolution of cells, bacteria and viruses,” said Purdue postdoctoral researcher Siyang Sun. “The mimivirus is like an intermediate between a cell and a virus. We usually think of cells as being alive and a virus is thought of as being non-living because it needs a host cell to complete its life cycle. The mimivirus straddles a middle ground between viruses and living cells, perhaps redefining what a virus is.” The study appears in the journal PLoS Biology.

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Antioxidants in Coffee

Coffee is admittedly the most popular drink in the United States. The National Coffee Association found in 2000 that 54% of the adult population of the United States drinks coffee daily and 18.12% of the coffee drinkers in the United States drink gourmet coffee beverages daily. In addition to the 54% who drink coffee everyday, 25% of Americans drink coffee occasionally. That number has increased significantly over the last seven years.

A recent study, headed by a chemist at the University of Scranton and funded by the American Cocoa Research Institute, found that Americans get their major dose of antioxidants through their high consumption of coffee.

The study analyzed over 100 food and beverages, measuring the levels of antioxidants in each dietary source, including antioxidants that are hidden in sugar molecules. After finding the levels of antioxidants, the researchers compared their data to the U.S. government statistics on food and beverage consumption. What they found was that coffee is the main source of antioxidants in the American diet and that most of the antioxidants from coffee are hidden in sugar molecules.

While Americans received most of their antioxidants from coffee, black tea, bananas, beans and corn, other foods showed a much higher level of antioxidant content. Red grapes, cranberries, blueberries and dates were at the top of the list of high antioxidant foods, though the U.S. Dept of Agriculture statistics did not show Americans consuming as much of these foods.

While some researchers have linked coffee to diseases such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, other studies have shown coffee to protect against disease. Research has shown coffee consumption to protect against colon, liver and Parkinson’s disease, as well as type 2 diabetes.

Some experts are arguing that more research needs to be done. They are claiming that antioxidant studies on certain foods, does not necessary convert into antioxidants received by the body. Although the process of antioxidant utilization is still being understood, many claim that health benefits can only be measured through the absorption of these foods into the body, not by measuring their antioxidant levels before digestion.

While the prospect of coffee being a healthy beverage is exciting, researchers still recommend that people eat a balanced diet, rich in fruits, vegetables and whole grains, to get the wide variety of nutrients and vitamins they need to stay healthy and protect themselves against disease.
 

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