News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today reported an increase in pandemic H1N1 flu activity in the nation, focused primarily in five southeastern states, along with an isolated case of swine H3N2 influenza in a patient from Kansas.

Officials from the CDC have said they expect flu activity to pick up again when students return to school, and many districts in the southeast resumed classes on Aug 10.

(CIDRAP News) – Public health officials in Canada yesterday announced that they have detected a new influenza strain—one that contains human seasonal flu and a swine flu virus—in two workers on a Saskatchewan hog farm.

The workers had mild illness and have recovered, and authorities are investigating a third suspected case, the Public Health Agency of Canada said in statement yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – To outside observers, the novel H1N1 virus spreading quickly to every corner of the globe must seem like it came out of nowhere, but the organism is a fourth generation of the 1918 pandemic virus and comes from an H1N1 family tree that is colorful and complex, according to two historical reviews that appear today in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

(CIDRAP News) – At almost the same moment today that the World Health Organization announced recognition of an influenza pandemic, researchers from Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and the United States declared that the novel H1N1 virus responsible has been circulating undetected in humans for months—and that its components have been present in pigs for at least a decade.

(CIDRAP News) – Government officials and researchers may have underestimated the potential role of pigs as "mixing vessels" for influenza viruses and the importance of swine surveillance for identifying new pandemic threats, veterinary experts from Mexico asserted recently.

Jun 3, 2009

(CIDRAP News) – Officials from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today unveiled the first comprehensive analysis of the novel H1N1 influenza virus, shedding some light on its source, which appears to be pigs in an area where surveillance gaps exist.

(CIDRAP News) – An international group of experts has examined and rejected the idea proposed recently by an Australian scientist that the novel H1N1 influenza (swine flu) virus is the product of a laboratory accident, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported today.

The World Health Organization (WHO) listed a global total of 2,500 confirmed cases of swine influenza H1N1 in 25 countries today. That total included 1,204 cases in Mexico, 896 cases in the United States (yesterday's number), 214 in Canada, 88 in Spain, and 34 in the United Kingdom. The death toll remains at 44, including 42 in Mexico and 2 in the United States. [WHO update 22]