More on the H1N1 (Mexican) Flu

The New York Times has an article today stating that

last week two separate teams — the one at Northwestern and a friendly rival at Indiana University, using different algorithms — both made predictions that matched almost exactly: flu from Mexico, if left utterly unchecked, would infect only 2,000 to 2,500 people in the United States in four weeks.

In a second article, the NYT reports

Swine flu has become widespread in the United States, with 226 cases in 30 states and more expected to turn up in additional states in the next few days, federal health officials said Sunday.

“I think it’s circulating all over the U.S.,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, the interim deputy director for science and public health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a news conference. “The virus has arrived, I would say, in most of the country now.”

The good news, Dr. Schuchat said, is that most cases in the United States have been mild, and health officials in Mexico said that cases there seemed to be leveling off.

But Dr. Schuchat said, “I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet.”

And in a third article, the NYT reported

“SWINE flu” last week was the most searched term on Yahoo, displacing “American Idol.”

The Wikipedia page Swine influenza had 1.3 million pages views on Wednesday and on Thursday. At the same time, Twitter was estimated to be transmitting 125,000 tweets a day mentioning swine flu — 1 percent of all the chatter there — overwhelmingly from users concerned about the outbreak’s potential to do harm rather than, say, describing stomach pains.

It seems pretty obvious that the public interest in the H1N1 flu is out-pacing the seriousness of the epidemic. JAD

The World Bank has announced that it "will support Mexico’s efforts to fight the spread of the Swine Flu virus with more than $205 million in fast disbursing funds." Bloomberg reports a case of swine flu in a staff member of the World Bank.

The Communications Initiative provides an online Dosier on Avian Flu and of course the communications strategy for all flus are similar.