Swine flu today, part II

Today's numbers from the CDC:

No need to panic

WebMD wonders if people aren’t, perhaps, overreacting to the swine flu (or 2009 flu, or H1N1 flu, or swine-origin H1N1 type A influenza, or cooties, or whatever you want to call it). After reminding readers that there is no "panic" in "pandemic", their website lists the following 7 things to keep in mind:

1. Most swine flu cases have been mild, so far. Severe cases have been seen mainly in Mexico, for reasons that aren't yet clear. But most swine flu patients have recovered without being hospitalized.
2. You're not defenseless against swine flu. Simple things -- washing your hands, not touching your mouth, eyes, or nose, and trying to avoid close contact with sick people -- can go a long way toward reducing your risk.
3. Most swine flu cases so far have been pretty much like normal, seasonal flu. Swine flu and seasonal flu share symptoms, and spread the same way.
4. How much do you worry about seasonal flu? Maybe you should give garden-variety flu a little more respect. In a typical U.S. flu season, an average of 36,000 people die of flu or flu complications, and about 200,000 people are hospitalized. Swine flu hasn't come anywhere close to that.
5. Swine flu's future is unknown. No one knows where swine flu is headed -- for better or for worse. "You don't know if it's going to fizzle out in a couple weeks or become more or less virulent or severe in the diseases it causes," CDC Acting Director Richard Besser, MD, said on April 29. "If we could see into the future [that] would be absolutely wonderful, but that's not the case. That's why we're being aggressive" in seeking to limit swine flu's impact on human health.
6. The world is more prepared than ever. Remember bird flu? When that was the "it" virus several years ago, the global health community ramped up its pandemic preparations. As a result of that work, "the world is better prepared for an influenza pandemic than at any time in history," WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said on April 29.
7. Pandemics aren't all deadly." If the World Health Organization declares swine flu a pandemic, that's all about the spread of the virus -- not the severity of the illness. In the past, some pandemics have been mild, while others have been severe, notes WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl, adding that "people should act with common sense, not with panic."

The do have a pretty extensive swine flu resource center, just in case you're still worried about it.

What's in a name

It looks like the Israelis aren't the only ones who have problems with using the term "swine flu" to describe the virus that is threatening to become a global pandemic:

On April 27, Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack – former governor of the major hog-producing state of Iowa — was still calling it swine flu. But the next day, he was referring to it by its clunky, clinical name. "This really isn't swine flu," he said, "it's H1N1 virus. That's very, very important." He wanted the public to understand that the flu is not spread by eating pork.

"There are a lot of hard-working families whose livelihood depends on us conveying this message of safety," Vilsack said. "And it's not just simply pork production. It's also grain farmers because markets are very sensitive."

And while many government officials, including President Obama, have began referring to the virus and illness as "H1N1", some people in the scientific community don't think that's a good idea:

Scientists, it turns out, are very sensitive as well. According to NPR science correspondent Richard Knox, within the scientific community — and within CDC — there is a lot of tension about the Obama administration's insistence that the virus be referred to as "H1N1." Scientifically, H1N1 is a confusing term for this new flu virus. Two-thirds of the everyday flu viruses making the rounds this flu season are H1N1. And various forms of H1N1 have circulated in humans between 1918 and 1957, and then from 1977 until the present. (...) Ironically, swine flu is a more scientifically specific term for this strain than H1N1, Knox reports.

So while the term "swine flu" has been bad for pork producers and agriculture in general, there is a fear that using simply "H1N1" as a name will cause confusion and possibly even panic when people hear of an "H1H1" outbreak that is simply the normal seasonal flu virus. It could, I suppose, cause confusion as to whether or not a person is vaccinated, since this year's batch of flu vaccine IS specific for an H1N1 virus, but IS NOT effective against this particular (swine-origin) H1N1 type. For now, the CDC is referring to it as "Swine-origin Influenza A (H1N1) virus", but I wouldn't really expect that to catch on outside of the scientific community.

My guess is that, in the future, it will be retroactively referred to as the 2009 Flu. Until then, who knows?

Zack

Zipscribble

I stumbled across this yesterday (while looking for population density maps for a biology lecture) and thought it was pretty cool. If you've ever wondered what you get when you connect all of the postal zip codes in the United States in ascending order (like a giant connect-the-dots puzzle), then here's your answer:If you're interested, you can see an animated version of the map here.

Swine flu today

1. Yesterday's numbers from the CDC:


2. Public officials (including the White House) spent a lot of time yesterday trying to convince people that it is still safe to fly after the Vice President had this to say on national TV:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

3. The rapid spread of the disease prompted the closing of schools around the nation.

4. Israel's Deputy Health Minister finds the term "swine flu" to be offensive.

5. Public health and agriculture officials are working hard to remind people that pork products are safe to eat.

This week's top stories

A Friday roundup of top news stories:

1. The H1N1 "swine flu" has gone global.

2. Kathleen Sebelius was confirmed and sworn in as the secretary of Health and Human Services. Mark Parkinson was sworn in to replace her as governor of Kansas.

3. President Obama marked his 100th day in office.

4. Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania announced that he would switch parties from republican to democrat. Specter was expected to loose the republican primary for his seat next year, and switched parties in an attempt to keep his job. This move will give Senate democrats a fillibuster-proof 60 seats when the dust settles in Minnesota.

5. The economy still sucks.

Einstein and God

I've been working my way through Walter Isaacson's biography of Einstein, and a particular passage caught my eye. It comes from chapter 17, titled "Einstein's God", and speaks to the man's religious views:

One evening in Berlin, Einstein and his wife were at a dinner party when a guest expressed a belief in astrology. Einstein ridiculed the notion as pure superstition. Another guest stepped in and similarly disparaged religion. Belief in God, he insisted, was likewise a superstition.

At this point the host tried to silence him by invoking the fact that even Einstein harbored religious beliefs.

"It isn't possible!" the skeptical guest said, turning to Einstein to ask if he was, in fact, religious.

"Yes, you can call it that," Einstein replied calmly. "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious."

When asked by an interviewer if he believed in God, Einstein's response was:

I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.

And from a piece of Eistein's writing called "What I Believe" comes this little nugget:

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experience there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness.

Science will continue to guide our understanding of the nature which we are a part of. And faith must always be, by definition, a belief in that for which there is no emperical basis for belief. And no matter how much science illuminates about the nature of our existence, for those of us who believe, faith will always be a part of it.

*This post is dedicated to Mrs. G...

Pooh, Piglet, and swine flu

I try not to be an irreverent jerk on this blog, but this one made me laugh:

Daily Recap: Thursday, 4/30

Anatomy and Physiology:
We took notes over the small intestine, pancreas and liver.

Biology:
Notes over textbook section 4.1, "Population Dynamics".

Daily Recap: Wednesday, 4/29

Anatomy and Physiology:
A new Physio-Phocus is available. It is, as always, chock-full of useful information. We spent most of the class period today talking about the H1N1 "swine" flu.

Biology:
Read textbook section 4.1. The reading strategy is students' choice.

Swine flu today

*The World Health Organization has raised the pandemic alert level from 4 to 5:

The decision to raise the alert level from phase 4 to phase 5 means there is evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission that is capable of causing community outbreaks in two countries in a single WHO region, Chan told reporters in a teleconference this afternoon. That’s now true in the Americas region, which includes Mexico and the U.S., both of which have had such transmission.

So far there have been 148 reported cases of swine flu in nine countries -- 91 (incuding one death) in the U.S., 26 (including seven deaths) in Mexico, 13 in Canada, five in the United Kingdom, four in Spain, three in Germany, three in New Zealand, two in Israel, and one in Austria -- according to the WHO. But media reports suggest Mexico has accumulated as many as 2,400 cases, over 150 of them fatal.

Will swine flu will escalate into a full-fledged global pandemic, prompting the WHO to raise the alert level to phase 6?* For this to happen, the new virus must take root in multiple countries in multiple regions of the world, said Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's assistant director-general for health security and environment.

And that may not be far off, Fukuda suggested: "We think that we are in the process of moving toward there." But he provided no timeline.

**And, of course, after level 6 comes the dreaded "Holy Frickin' Crap" level.

*Today's stats from the CDC:



*Most notable among the numbers above is the first death from the H1N1 flu in the United States. The victim was a 23 month old Mexican boy who was visiting relatives in Texas.

*I'm waiting for Morgan Freeman and Dustin Hoffman to come and save us from this:

Missing links

There's a good reason why you don't hear knowledgeable people talking about "gaps" or "missing links" in the fossil record. It's because, while the fossil record will never be complete, scientists are continually discovering new fossilized species. And these new species continue to show transition of life from one form to another throughout evolutionary history. As ScienceNOW reported last week, scientists have recently discovered the fossilized remains of a land dwelling mammal that appears to be an ancient relative of modern seals, sea lions, and walruses.

The 20-million- to 24-million-year-old Arctic fossil sports webbed feet instead of flippers, providing a long-sought glimpse of what such animals looked like before they dove into the sea.

Before marine mammals swam through the world's oceans, their ancestors meandered on land. Researchers have founds several intermediate fossils that trace the transition from land to water in whales and manatees, but they have no such record for pinnipeds--seals, sea lions, and walruses. Much to scientists' dismay, the most primitive pinniped fossils, which date to between 20 million and 28 million years ago, had full flippers, making it hard to pinpoint how the animals evolved to live in an aquatic environment. [...]

The 110-cm-long animal, Puijila darwini, resembled an otter, with a long tail, doglike teeth, and webbed feet. Like an otter, its body was adapted for swimming but spent most of its time on land. Rybczynski says that although the creature wasn't the direct ancestor of modern pinnipeds, it reveals what these ancestors might have looked like before they became fully flippered. She also says that finding this primitive fossil in the Arctic suggests that this area could be the center of pinniped evolution, contradicting the prevailing idea that the mammals evolved along the western coast of North America.

So here we have a fossil that shows characteristics of both land mammals and marine dwelling pinnipeds. That, my friends, is by definition a transitional fossil, which fits neatly into a "gap" in the fossil record. And as interesting as the fossil itself is, the story of its discovery is the stuff of science folklore:

In 2007, vertebrate paleontologist Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and her colleagues were returning to their camp from a long day of fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic when they ran out of fuel. While Rybczynski left to get more gas, her graduate student, who was supposed to make sure that the vehicle was refueled, scuffed the ground in irritation and uncovered part of a shin bone. By the time Rybczynski returned, her colleagues' hands were filled with little black bones, and they were doing what Rybczynski refers to as "the fossil dance." Within a few days, the team had recovered most of the skeleton.

At first, they thought they had uncovered some sort of strange otter, but when they examined the fossils back in the lab, the teeth and parts of the skull hinted that the animal was a flipper-less, primitive pinniped. They couldn't be sure, because they lacked the diagnostic portion of the skull. Within minutes of returning to the field in 2008, they found what they were looking for and celebrated with another round of fossil dances. The skeleton represents the most primitive pinniped to date, the team reports...

You see how that works? You make an observation, collect data, learn as much as you can from that data, and then use that data to make predictions that drive further testing.

Science. It's good stuff.

(Image credit: Mark A. Klingler via Origins)

Name that "M"

Nobody got last week's "mystery M":

Here's a new one for you to think about:

Daily Recap: Tuesday, 4/29

I'm sorry I haven't gotten to this until now. I'm behind in just about everything due to the state testing earlier in the week...

Anatomy and Physiology:
Another work day since half of each class is in the library taking the physical science portion of the state science tests.

Biology:
We spent some time discussing swine flu, followed by a brief review of the water cycle and the carbon/oxygen cycle.

Is the distance between Earth and its moon increasing?

Lest I be accused of focusing too much attention on the swine flu, I thought I'd share this little tidbit that I pulled off of Stardate late last week:

Just like a spinning ice skater whose rotation slows as he extends his arms, the Earth-Moon distance is lengthening because Earth is spinning slower each day. The Moon's gravitational influence is slowing Earth's rate of rotation down by one and a half thousandths of a second every 100 years. The loss of rotational energy -- angular momentum, for the physicists in the crowd -- is necessarily matched by an increase in the Moon's angular momentum, which results in a larger orbit for the Moon.

Currently, the Moon moves less than two inches a year farther away from Earth -- a tiny amount, but easily measurable with modern laser-ranging devices.

If this rate of slowing were to remain constant, we could expect the Earth to stop spinning in 2.1 trillion years. That's a pretty long time, considering the upper range of estimates for the age of the universe are about 20 billion years.

At the end of that 21 billion years, the moon would be 66.4 million miles farther away from the Earth than it is today (240,000 miles). This would put it about 2/3 of the the way to the sun, and would make it farther from Earth than both Mars and Venus for much of the year.

This all, of course, assumes that the forces acting on the moon and Earth would remain constant...which they obviously would not.

Call me obsesive, but...

You can use Google Maps to track new cases of the swine flu. (I deleted the embedded map because it was making the blog load REALLY slowly...Sorry.)

H What N What?

In case I haven't been clear about this, the swine flu outbreak really has me nervous. Not in a stockpile-food-and-ammo way...but it's definitely something that I'm keeping a close eye on. There are a few constants throughout all of human history. War is one of them. Plague is another.

So I thought I'd spend a little time here talking about what the flu is, beginning with how flu viruses are named.


Viruses are, essentially, nucleic acid particles surrounded by a protein capsid and a lipid envelope. The nucleic acid can be either DNA or RNA, and in the case of influenza its the latter. Sticking off of the outer coating are little markers called "antigens". While there are many different types of antigens, two in particular are important: one called hemagglutinin and another called neuraminidase. For influenza viruses, there are 16 known types of hemagglutinin antigens and 9 known types of neuraminidase antigens. Since a particular virus strain will only have one of each, they are referred to by the types of these two antigens present.

For example, the current swine flu that is threatening to become a global pandemic is designated H1N1. This means that it has the type 1 hemagglutinin antigen and the type 1 neuraminidase antigen. The bird flu outbreak a few years ago in souteast Asia was type H5N1. In the past 100 years, there have been pandemic outbreaks of both H2N2 and H3N2, along with the grandaddy of all flu pandemics, the 1918 influenza outbreak which was (like this year's threat) an H1N1 virus.

The problem with the flu virus is that it frequently mutates, and any mutations typically affect the antigens on the outer surface of the virus. It's these antigens that the body's immune system recognizes and attacks. So by constantly changing these to new forms, viruses are able to easily evade the body's defense mechanisms. This is one reason why it's necessary to get a new flu shot every year (and why many people each year catch the flu even after getting vaccinated against it)...the antigens on the surface of a viral strain will change enough from year to year that the body won't recognize it.*

*In contrast, antigens on the surface of the virus that causes measles do not mutate, which is why the measles vaccination that most of us got as children should provide lifetime immunity.

Strains like this H1N1 "swine flu" that has come out of Mexico are especially scary because they are mutated forms of an animal virus. In the case of this one, it's a hybrid of pig, bird, and human viruses. What this means is that, while the combination of antigen types (H1N1) is nothing new to humanity, our species has never before been exposed to the actual antigens of this virus. There is, therefor, very little if any natural immunity to it. There is, therefor, a much greater likelihood of it becoming a global killer.

Daily Recap: Monday, 4/27

First day of KSA science testing!

Anatomy and Physiology:
Half the class (anyone who's a junior) is testing. The rest of the class has work days both today and tomorrow.

Biology:
Case study: "Using Predators to Manage Populations". This activity analyzes the relationship between predators and prey in a community.

News cycles

One of my final posts for last week dealt with the recent emergence of a new swine flu strain in Mexico. Over the weekend, that little news story became one of the major headlines around the world.

On my iGoogle start page, I have several widgets. One of those shows me the top 5 stories from National Public Radio. On Sunday, 4 of the 5 stories showing there were about the swine flu. As I write this, none of them are. In fact, here's what I'm seeing right now:

Since the threat posed by this new strain of the flu definitely hasn't gone away, we can only assume that this is the product of a very quick news cycle. In order to attract readers, online news sources are forced to constantly update their feeds to provide newer and fresher stories. Sometime this means that the big or important stories can get buried pretty quickly.

When I looked at this closer, though, I noticed the fourth story. "Strong Earthquake Felt in Mexico City". As in "the same Mexico City that is reeling from the new flu outbreak". Holy crap! This is starting to look more and more like a certain online video game that I've discussed here before.