Swine Flu: Look Hard Enough, and You’ll See Strange Things -- WSJ blog

[nashville_brook]

Swine Flu: Look Hard Enough, and You’ll See Strange Things


http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/04/23/swine-flu-look-hard-enough-and-youll-see-strange-things/

By Jacob Goldstein

(snip)

People do occasionally get infected with strains of flu that mainly infect pigs. But the strain in these cases appears to be spreading from person to person, which is the kind of thing that catches the attention of public-health officials.

None of the people who were infected had contact with pigs, as far as officials know. And there are two pairs of cases where the human-to-human transmission seems clear: a father-daughter pair and two boys in Texas who attended the same school.

(snip)

The fact that five more cases have now been confirmed isn’t an indication of the rate at which the flu is spreading; rather, it’s the result of intensive surveillance by the CDC and state health officials to try to figure out exactly what’s going on. And that surveillance is likely to lead to more confirmed cases in the coming days, Anne Schuchat, a CDC respiratory diseases expert, said on a press call this afternoon.

Indeed, the very fact that this strain was identified in the first place is likely the result of the way flu surveillance has increased in the past few years. The first two cases were both detected by special programs — one at a Navy facility that was studying a new kind of flu testing, and another at a project set up to do intensive surveillance around the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We haven’t seen this strain before, but we haven’t been looking as intensively as we are these days,” Schuchat said.