EFFING FLUVIA

UPI - Since January more than 13,000 people have died of complications from seasonal flu, officials said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's weekly report said no fewer than 800 flu-related deaths were reported in any week between Jan. 1-April 18, the most recent week for which figures were available. Seasonal flu is expected to keep killing hundreds of people every week for the rest of the year.

The researchers looked at deaths in the 122 largest U.S. cities with about 9 out of 10 of the deaths among people age 65 or older, the reports said.

Worldwide annual death from seasonal flu is estimated between 250,000 and 500,000, the CDC report said.

Los Angeles Times - As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.

"Let's not lose track of the fact that the normal seasonal influenza is a huge public health problem that kills tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands around the world," said Dr. Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine in Madison. . .

Flu viruses are known to be notoriously unpredictable, and this strain could mutate at any point -- becoming either more benign or dangerously severe. But mounting preliminary evidence from genetics labs, epidemiology models and simple mathematics suggests that the worst-case scenarios are likely to be avoided in the current outbreak.

"This virus doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to kill like the 1918 virus," which claimed an estimated 50 million victims worldwide, said Richard Webby, a leading influenza virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

Unsilent Generation - In certain ways, the world’s experience with Avian flu may actually have rendered it less, rather than more, prepared for a new outbreak. The Daily Telegraph (UK) reported earlier this week on a meeting of scientists held in Austria back in February, before the swine flu had surfaced. There, Harvard professor Thomas Monath warned that because so much attention had been focused on bird flu, if another strain popped up, “we would be screwed.” The Telegraph’s medical editor writes:

"He warned vaccine manufacturing capacity is insufficient, meaning that if a pandemic strain of flu emerged now it would be impossible to make enough for the world’s population in time."

The scientific community had become “complacent” about a new flu pandemic because the avian influenza strain H5N1 has been around for 13 years without spreading around the world. . .

A second unlearned lesson has to do with the way we treat our livestock. Here, again, explicit warnings have been ignored. In an excellent piece on Huffington Post, David Kirby . . . cites a 2008 report by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which “included research on emerging forms of avian-swine-human influenza viruses.” The report warned of a scenario much like one that has emerged in Mexico, where “patient zero” is thought to be a boy living in a rural hamlet near a factory hog farm owned by Smithfield Foods. . .

The Humane Society, which tracks factory farming because of the cruel conditions in which these animals live, also points out that the present H1N1 strain “is not the first triple hybrid human/bird/pig flu virus to be discovered.” It cites a previous outbreak on a North Carolina factory farm in 1998, and reports: