According to the report, dead birds found in West Bengal’s Murshidabad area were found to have been infected with the bird flu virus. once again bird culling is being done in the area and a team from the health ministry has also been deployed to the area where house to house surveillance will be carried out with tests being carried out on those that show flu like symptoms such as cough, cold and respiratory illnesses. Isolation wards have also been set up to contain the virus.

While the virus strains are of course different, the other chief differences between avain and swine flu are:

• The dangers posed by bird flu are actually far higher. As many as 60% of infected individuals have died so far whereas the mortality among those infected with swine flu is far lower, the same as common or seasonal flu.
• Bird flu spreads from handling or being in contact with infected animals whereas the swine flu virus does not spread easily from animal to humans.
• On the other hand the swine flu virus is highly contagious and spreads easily from human to human. Sneezing and shaking hands is also likely to spread the virus.
• Swine flu is a pandemic and has infected far more people the world over than the bird flu. As many as 5 million Americans were infected with the H1N1 swine flu from the time the disease first emerged in mid-April until mid-December, and about 11,200 people died, according to official figures. An estimated 246,000 hospitalisations took place in the US due to this.

There is now an apprehension of what will happen if the two viruses intermingle; if such a resultant virus will be both highly contagious as well as deadly. The reason that this fear has surfaced is due to the fact that the swine flu virus is already prevalent in the area that the examples of bird flu have been seen. Fortunately it is only this geographical area that is seeing instances of avian flu among birds, nowhere else in the country has this been noted.

In 2004, the World Bank had approved $68 million for India to implement the project. This deal was due to expire on March 31, 2010, but it was decided to extend the project for another two years at a review meeting in New Delhi on November 10.

“The extension will definitely boost our efforts to check the spread of the H1N1 virus which is rapidly entrenching itself in rural parts of the state,” said Pandit Chavan, joint director of the state health services.

The indigenously developed Swine flu vaccines are still some time away from being available in India. In the event there are plans to import the vaccines, which however have to be tested in Indian conditions and on Indians. The efficacy and safety of the vaccines for the Indian populace is yet to be determined and trails to determine this will be conducted in two weeks’ time according to this Times report.

To the end that the imported vaccines can be effectively be used for Indians, international vaccine manufacturers — Novartis, GSK, Sanofi Pasteur and Baxter — which are ready with an H1N1 candidate vaccine, some of which is already in use in several countries, were asked to submit their vaccine testing protocol to the Indian Council of Medical Research.

Meanwhile even in countries where the Swine flu vaccine is ready and available for use, there is a short fall in the requisite number of doses. According to this Bloomberg report, regions in the United States have received so far, only 25 percent of the 411,000 doses anticipated for October, and that there is a nationwide shortfall in meeting demand for the swine flu vaccine.

There is particular anger being expressed by parents who are hoping to acquire the vaccine to ensure safety of their children from the swine flu virus, who are more at risk from the infection. At places mass vaccination attempts have also met with failure since there are not enough doses of the vaccine available to do the needful.

In India the hope is being expressed that prior to the second wave of swine flu which is expected by January, at least some vaccines will be available. It is expected that by April-end, India’s indigenous vaccine should be available for mass use.

In Karnataka the death toll is up to 111 and the authorities have said that they are well prepared for the second wave of swine flu that the approaching winter will bring. “We have arranged awareness programs on swine flu at district level to make people take preventive measures to stop the spread of the virus. The programs will start in a week’s time,” said one official as reported here.

In the United States the Swine Flu pandemic has been declared a national emergency as reported here, which will gives hospitals the freedom and flexibility they need to start treating the virus like an emergency.  Declaring a national emergency permits hospitals to set up alternate care facilities for swine flu victims in schools, nursing homes or other satellite sites without jeopardizing their reimbursement payments from Medicare and Medicaid. This can also help set up triage centers to determine levels of care and treat the sickest patients first.

The usual symptoms of nausea, body pain, high fevers, the lack of appetite, sinus congestion, body aches, hacking, were all reported by Gupta who was reported here as saying this was the “sickest I have ever been”.  Gupta is an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine and associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.

Whereas in usual course Gupta and his cameraman would have visited the battlefield hospital as correspondents, this time it was in order to seek medical assistance.

According to a Bloomberg report, the Swine flu may hospitalize 1.8 million patients in the U.S. this year, filling intensive care units to capacity and causing “severe disruptions” during fall resurgence.

The worry is that hospitals could face severe disruptions due to the swine flu. Up to 80% ICU facilities may be required for swine flu cases, forcing hospitals to put off elective surgeries such as heart bypass or hernia operations. There is now pressure to speed up the process of producing vaccines to ease this burden on the public and private health care system.

According to the adviser report, the virus may “produce infection of 30-50 percent of the US population this fall and winter, with symptoms in approximately 20-40 percent of the population (60-120 million people), more than half of whom would seek medical attention,” and went on to say that it “could cause between 30,000 and 90,000 deaths in the United States, concentrated among children and young adults.”

Meanwhile in India, the death toll from swine flu continues to mount, and has now reached the number of 67 deaths. New positive identifications of infection by the virus continue to come to light daily and the swine flu death toll in the country continues to rise.

People in the developed world have access to better health care and medical facilities and they have the economic wherewithal to combat illnesses. They are better nourished and are physically better equipped and more able to recover from disease and infection.

It has therefore been suggested that the pattern found in the western world is not the token that can be applied to the less developed and poorer countries, because the people there do not have the same realities. If infections from H1N1 virus are seen as being largely mild and self correcting in most cases in the west, it is not automatically the same in the developing world.

Another factor that may be causing spread of the infection to be underestimated is the fact that the poor portions of the population is usually less educated, inadequately informed and unable to report illnesses because of lack of access or economic ability. Developed nations have a far more effective public health system, so tracking the H1N1 infection and its progression is far easier and more accurate.

The Swine Flu virus has underlined not only the rich and poor nation divide; it has also highlighted a urban and rural segregation by an extension of the same principle. In any case rural areas are far flung and people living in the more remote villages have practically no access to health care because the closest medical facility may be too far to walk to. And this is in normal everyday circumstances.

When there is a pandemic which has its grip on an entire nation, these already underprivileged persons have no recourse: testing facilities for identifying positive swine flu cases are to be found only in bigger urban centers. The rural poor are a low priority in a situation where the educated urban individual is doing his best to jump the queue.

With swine flu what is required is immediate detection of a positive case, isolation of that person by way of a quarantine or isolation ward and quick treatment for indications which look like developing into potentially life threatening complications. Needless to say India’s rural poor are not high on the priority for any of what is required to treat and contain the pandemic.

Kids already top the government’s priority list for swine-flu shots this year because that new influenza strain targets the young. That’s unusual, as flu usually is most dangerous to older adults.

But Thursday’s study, in the journal Science, says vaccinating students should be a priority every year — because schoolchildren are influenza’s prime spreaders and their parents then are the virus’ bridge to the rest of the community. The idea: Inoculating spreaders could create something of a cocoon around the people most at risk of flu-caused death.

Source: MSNBC