Anatomy of a Pandemic: H1N1 mysterious, deadly - but not as lethal as feared

[indigo girl]

Part I

...Canadian researchers discovered the virus was behaving in startling ways. It was preferentially attacking the young and generally healthy - a group flu normally spares - and causing catastrophically low levels of oxygen in the blood, serious lung damage and multi-organ failure.

"Yes, mortality was less than what we expected, but look who was dying," Upshur says. "It was younger people who had a probability of death that was as low as can be, on an average basis. And all of these were preventable deaths. Yes, I'm glad there weren't tens of thousands of deaths - who would wish that? But the deaths that did occur were disproportionately in younger people, who you would not have expected to die."

This was an eerie flashback to SARS. For health care workers who experienced that outbreak, H1N1 at first stirred memories of healthy, relatively young people in acute respiratory distress.

(hat tip pfi/pixie)

Read the full story here: http://www.canada.com/health/ANATOMY+PENDEMIC/2382470/story.html

[indigo girl]

Part II

...as the spring wave slowed, and H1N1 activity died down, so too did public sense of urgency and seriousness. The virus wasn't cutting a swath across Asia and South America. Horror fantasies about the flu are always about the possibility of a repeat of Spanish flu, of horse-drawn carriages carrying corpses, but people weren't dropping dead in the streets. When Canada announced it was buying an adjuvanted vaccine, some feared the vaccine more than the virus itself. An adjuvant is a chemical added to the vaccine to boost the body's immune response.

"You had the steady drumbeat of instant experts who were saying how the adjuvant is going to kill way more people than the disease," says Dr. Brian Ward, an infectious-disease physician and associate director of the Research Institute at McGill University Health Centre.

Then Evan Frustaglio died on the very day the H1N1 flu shot clinics opened, and everything changed. "All of a sudden, everybody wanted it," Brown, of the University of Ottawa, says. "You had people swarming the ERs, and the second wave was on."

The rest of the story at: http://www.canada.com/health/Anatomy+pandemic+Part/2382471/story.html