Interesting Facts about Swine Flu (H1N1)

Influenza Season and the Swine Flu H1N1:
While the typical influenza season is usually during the cold and dry months of Winter and early Spring months (Science Daily article on typical human flu); the current H1N1 flu (Swine or Pig Flu) has spread very rapidly during the months of April and May which are in fact warm in Mexico, current temperatures in Mexico City are in the 70-80's °F during this time of the year. A study by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City found that normal flu thrives in winter months because of the low humidity and low temperature.

The jury is still out on whether this influenza virus will thrive in the hot months only or if its effect will increment during the cold months of winter/early spring. This is a reason why the development of a vaccine is necessary: so that we can be prepared for it when we are the most vulnerable. It is still unclear if the colder weather will make the spread of this virus more aggressive.

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Genetic Makeup of H1N1 Swine Influenza Virus:
The current H1N1 Influenza Virus has a genetic makeup that includes genes from three different virus that affect pigs, birds, and humans. It is now apparent that the predecessor to the current H1N1 pork flu had already been around in pigs for 10 years and just recently acquired the additional genes that have allowed it to become virulent in humans.

The H1N1 chimeric virus is mostly of swine origin, with 6 segments from pig virus, 1 from bird, and the last from human.

The pig flu virus can jump back and forth from Humans and Poricine species.
The H1N1 virus is first thought to have jumped from pigs to humans in Mexico, and it has been confirmed that once it made it to Canada, it infected pigs jumping from a human host. Humans that work in proximity with pigs are rarely infected with porcine-viruses, it is even more rare that a human infected with porcine virus infects another human (happens every 5 decades or so), but what was never documented is the virus of pig oringin jumping back to pigs.

Ten facts about swine flu

Swine flu is an acute respiratory disease which affects pigs. In pigs, according to the World Health Organisation, "morbidity tends to be high and mortality low" - which means that it spreads quickly but kills between 1 and 4 per cent of its victims.

Pigs are the perfect mixing vessels for what is known as reassortment of flu strains, when genetic material from swine flu, human flu and avian flu is jumbled up to create entirely new influenza strains to which humans have little or no immunity.

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The currrent H1N1 virus contains genetic elements from North American swine flu, North American avian (bird) flu, and human and swine flu strains normally found in Asia and Europe. According to the Centres for Disease Control it is "an unusually mongrelised mix of genetic sequences".

This new strain of swine flu is not infecting pigs - and has never been seen in pigs.

Seasonal flu viruses (which mutate every year) kill between 250,000 and 500,000 people a year.

The symptoms produced by the current strain of swine flu resemble those of seasonal flu - fever, coughing, muscle aches and extreme tiredness - but it also appears to cause diarrhoea.

The currrent H1N1 virus contains genetic elements from North American swine flu, North American avian (bird) flu, and human and swine flu strains normally found in Asia and Europe. According to the Centres for Disease Control it is "an unusually mongrelised mix of genetic sequences".

The most lethal flu pandemic of the past century was also caused by a swine flu strain. One billion people are thought to have contracted "Spanish flu" in 1918-19, of whom around 50 million were killed - although the death toll could have been much higher.

In 1976, an Army recruit at Ford Dix, New Jersey, complained that he was feeling tired and weak. He died the following day. After Swine flu was diagnosed panicked officials persuaded Gerald Ford that the entire population needed vaccination. About 40 million people were vaccinated before another fear took hold - that the vaccine was more dangerous than the disease - and the programme was aborted.

The WHO's pandemic alert level has been raised a notch to level 4. Level 5 is considered a pandemic - with "sustained community-level transmission" in at least two countries - and level 6 a full-scale global pandemic affecting more than one region in the world.

Symptoms of H1N1 (Swine Flu)




This Video Cures Swine Flu

SOURCE: pigflu.com / timesonline.co.uk /

Interesting Facts About Diseases

Ninety percent of all teenagers suffer from some form of acne.

A woman's arthritic pains will almost always disappear as soon as she becomes pregnant. No one knows why.

A study at the Harvard School of Public Health revealed that women who drink one or more cups of coffee a day are two and a half times more likely to get bladder cancer than women who drink no coffee.

One cannot catch cold at the North Pole in winter. Neither can one contract the flu, nor most of the ailments transmitted viruses and germs. The winter temperature is so low in this part of the world that none of the standard disease causing Micro-organisms can survive.

The chances of an American woman gettinq breast cancer depend on a number of variables. For a woman whose sister's mother, or daughter has developed cancer in both breasts the chances are five to three against, however, if one of these relatives developed cancer before reaching menopase the odds are fifty-fifty. Women with the lowest chances of getting breast cancer are those whose ovaries have been removed before the age of thirty five. Chances are almost as good for a woman who has had a child before the age of eighteen.

Teenagers are 50 percent more susceptible to colds than people over fifty.

Every year some 10,000 infants in the United States die from a mysterious ailment known as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), or Crib Death. Most of these children have been put to bed hours before their death, seemingly in perfect health. All die without a trace of struggle. As yet no one has been able to explain the cause of these deaths.

Diabetes was the third leading cause of death by disease in America. It has increased 50 percent since 1965, and today affects at least 15 million people.

In 1971, at Memorial Hospital in New York City, a woman weighing less than 100 pounds ran a fever of 114 degrees and survived without brain damage or physiological after effects.

There is a strange and terrible disease known as bulimia in which the victim develops a ravenous, insatiable appetite. A woman observed in St. Bartholomew's Hospital in nineteenthcentury London is recorded to have consumed three loaves of bread every day, along with three pounds of steak, large quantities of vegetables, a pound of cereal, and twenty glasses of water. An American doctor named Smith, reporting in the Medical and Surgical Reporter in Philadelphia, mentioned an even stranger case, that of a boy who ate continuously for fifteen hours every day and who had eight or nine bowel movements each evening. In one year this boy's weight increased from 105 to 284 pounds, and it was steadily increasing by about a half-pound a day. Despite his prodigious intake of food, the boy constantly complained of hunger. Another unpleasant ailment akin to this one is polydipsia, or constant thirst. Medical records mention a three-year-old child who drank two pailfuls of water every day. Sir M. MacKenzie, a British doctor, cited the case of a woman who drank four pailfuls of water a day and who once, appearing before a scientific commission, drank 14 quarts of water in ten hours, passed 10 quarts of urine, and continued to complain of thirst.

Two out of three adults in America have hemorrhoids.

The rate of hypertension is twice as high among blacks as whites in the United States, the rate of hypertension among men living in Vermont is also twice the national average, Women of all races are afflicted by this disorder far less than men.

A condition known as hypertrophy (enlargement) of the tongue can sometimes reach such extremes that the tongue becomes too large for the mouth and protrudes over the chin, reaching down as far as the chest. This extraordinary enlargement may cause deformity of the teeth and jaw, and may even cause the sufferer to choke on his or her own tongue.

In 1918 and 1919 a world epidemic of simple Influenza killed 20 million people in the United States and Europe.

Men are twice as likely to contract leprosy as women.

Medical studies show that members of the Seventh-Day Adventist church, even those living in heavily polluted areas, have 1,000 percent less lung cancer than members of the general population. Moreover, SeventhDay Adventists have appreciably lower rates of other cancers and of respiratory diseases, 40 percent less coronary trouble, and scarcely a quarter the amount of tooth decay found in the general population.

Neuritis and neuralgia are not diseases. They are nerve pains related to disease. In fact, when a pain is identified as neuralgia, it is often because the exact cause is not known Neural differs from neuritis in that neuralgia pains come in paroxysms, while neuritis is more constant and even. Thus sciatica is a kind of neuralgia and a toothache a kind of neuritis

Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.

Each year more than 300,000 American teenagers become afflicted with some form of venereal disease.