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Any cases out there? I have a brother with a suspected case of it. (He got sneezed on by a security guard checking passports at a Spanish airport and is now doing fine on Tamiflu.)
Now that the health authorities have stopped confirming cases with blood tests, are prescriptions for Tamiflu just being thrown about like snuff at a wake? 1500 suspected cases last week, but how many real ones?
Some figures…
25% (1 million) are expected to get this first wave of swine flu.
2% of those (20’000) will require hospitalisation.
20% of those (4’000) will require intensive care.
All our intensive care beds are already occupied.
My sister has a suspected as of this morning and now her husband is fading fast. Tamiflu for everyone!
I was probably felled by it in May in California. Absolutely poleaxed. Worst flu I’ve had in many many years. Barely able to move for a number of days. Took almost two weeks to fully recover. Very very nasty.
So now taking a very detached and philosophical attitude towards the whole swine flu hysteria as I probably have a full compliment of h1n1 antibodies…
I probably had it in April, really heavy flu, stayed in bed, on a diet of 7up for a week.
newsdaily.com/stories/tre56c … u-history/
*Experts unearth history of pandemic flu viruses
HONG KONG, July 13, 2009 (Reuters) — Flu viruses that sparked the three worst pandemics in the last century circulated in their near-complete forms for years before the catastrophes occurred, researchers in Hong Kong and the United States have found.
The H1N1 virus that sparked the Spanish flu of 1918-1919 circulated in swine and humans well before the pandemic started, and it did not come directly from birds as previously thought, they added. Instead, it was probably generated by genetic exchanges between flu viruses from swine and humans.*
This is interesting I see nearly 50 million Americans where given shots by the US Government against swine flu.
The Year 1976
How can anti bacterial kills swine flu virus if it not a bleeding bacteria?
Plus that poses another question which means I will have to reeducate my knowing regards to how viruses work because the concept of a virus is blowing my mind right now, it really is. 
BTW standard soup the original anti-bacterial and is not any worse than all those newfangled anti-bacterial washes they try and sell you. In fact it may even be better as there is not toxic crap in it.
Anti-bacterial what? If you mean stuff like alcohol hand wash then it’s not effective on all viruses but it is on the flu virus (I haven’t looked for the actual scientific evidence of this but it’s recommended so I assume there’s some).
Beyond that stuff like Tamiflu is very specific to flu or flu-like viruses, we don’t have effective broad spectrum anti-virals in the way that we do for bacteria.
Oh and if viruses in general blow your mind you’ll love this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus. Viral code which gets inserted into your genome and passed onto your children!
I think the virus is transmitted in much the same way as bacteria - I suppose they could rename all the bottles, seems like a good efficient HSE thing to do?
For handwashes and the like, anything that kills bacteria will almost certainly kill a virus. Virus’ are actully very fragile when compared to bacteria as their cell walls are much weaker. Therefore anything, like alcohol based handwash, that kills microorganisms by damaging their cell walls will have a devestating effect on a virus.
Antibiotics won’t have any effect on a virus as these are specifically targeted chemicals that inhibit specific characteristics of bacteria. As viruses are much more primative biological organisms, they are not affected as they don’t need to do what the antibiotic stops bacteria from doing anyway.
I knew one day that microbiology degree would come in handy…
So will soap destroy a virus?
The terms used here would indicate the a virus is an organism? Is it… really is it?
As far as I know anti-bacterial soap doesn’t have any extra effect on viruses compared to ordinary soap i.e. the detergent effect physically removes the virus particles off your skin.
merged: “Pinsters with Swine Flu.” and “How can anti-bacterial stuff kill swine flu virus?”
and renamed it to: Swine Flu.
I have a bit of a Cold at the moment.
Usuall symptoms, but nothing keeping me from work.
I am, however, sceptical of all this “Keep clean” shite floating about.
According to this article H1N1 is now also embedded in a seasonal flu vaccination.
Anyone with medical knowledge to clarify the significance of this?
H1N1 and 2009 H1N1 are not the same thing. The normal seasonal vaccine contains a H1N1 type virus.
if you take the letters out of h1n1, you get left with 11 
This flu goes up to 11?
I’m almost sure I had it last week. I’ve only ever had the flu twice in my life and this one was a doozy. But I managed. They don’t test for it so who knows if it was the regular one or the pig version? I chose to call it swine/regular depending on how badly I needed to get out of going somewhere.
A quick read of this to clarify the policy
Eh hello?