STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – The H1N1 pandemic flu virus could kill up to 40,000 people across Europe and be followed by seasonal flu waves that could kill the same number, European health experts said on Friday.

The Sweden-based European Center for Disease Prevention and Control said epidemics of H1N1, known as swine flu, were now affecting almost all countries in the European Union but it could not predict how intense the peaks would be.

What was certain, it said, was that the pandemic would continue to kill thousands and put many patients into intensive care as the northern hemisphere‘s winter sets in.

“All European countries will be affected, and this will put considerable stress on healthcare systems,” said ECDC director Zsuzsanna Jakab.

The ECDC, which monitors disease in the European Union and European free trade area (EFTA), said it was hard to predict what the mix of pandemic and seasonal flu viruses would bring but there was a risk of seasonal flu epidemics “early in 2010 when the pandemic waves have passed.”

Angus Nicoll, the ECDC’s flu coordinator, said in non-pandemic situations, seasonal flu could kill up to 40,000 people in Europe — and H1N1 could do the same.

“That is not a trivial number,” he said. “And the fact that H1N1 is happening in younger adults, pregnant women and people without risk factors … makes it feel different.”

RISKS AND DEATHS

The ECDC said experience from the United States and the southern hemisphere showed pregnant women with the virus are 10 times more likely to need intensive care than those with no risk factors. Those with asthma and chronic respiratory diseases have three times the risk and the very obese six times the risk.

But it also said evidence so far shows some 20 to 30 percent of H1N1 deaths are among healthy young people.

The ECDC’s latest daily update said all 27 EU and four EFTA countries have cases of H1N1 pandemic flu and there have been 389 deaths linked to H1N1 in the region since April, including 154 in Britain, 73 in Spain, 25 in Italy and 22 in France.

The ECDC’s global toll showed 6,005 fatal cases of H1N1 have been reported. The WHO, which updates its figures weekly, said on Thursday 5,712 people have died worldwide since H1N1 was discovered earlier this year.

The ECDC said the numbers of fatal cases associated with pandemic flu were “likely to be gross underestimates” as access to healthcare and lab tests varied from country to country.

GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis are among some 25 companies making pandemic vaccines, while other drugmakers including Roche are making antiviral therapies for use as frontline H1N1 treatment.

Nicoll said vaccination programs which started in some European countries in recent weeks were vital to protecting those most at risk but had come too late to halt the disease.

“We’re not trying at this stage to protect the whole of society with the vaccines. The strategy is to protect the vulnerable.”

(Editing by Janet Lawrence)

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80,000 flu deaths predicted in Europe

By Fiachra Ó Cionnaith and Evelyn Ring

출처 : Irish Examiner  Saturday, November 07, 2009
http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/kfauojausnsn/rss2/

A MAJOR medical monitoring group has claimed 80,000 Europeans could die from swine flu in the coming months, naming Ireland as one of the EU’s hotspots for the deadly pandemic.

Figures released by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) show that in recent weeks almost every country on the continent has seen a sharp rise in swine flu cases and hospitalisations.

Despite the widespread increase, the influential group singled out Ireland and Iceland as being worst affected by the pandemic and witnessing the highest intensity of swine flu diagnoses per head of population anywhere in the EU.

In the past week alone there have been 30,000 cases of swine flu in Ireland, with 14 deaths in the Republic and a further 10 fatalities in the North since the pandemic began.

As a result, the ECDC has placed Ireland in the “very high” risk category for further swine flu deaths — one of just two countries in the crisis situation.

According to the ECDC survey, Sweden is next-highest on the swine flu risk list, followed by Britain, both of whom are in the “moderate” category.

In the 27 EU countries and four European Free Trade Area (EFTA) nations there have been 389 swine flu-related deaths to date, including 14 in Ireland, 154 in Britain, 73 in Spain, 25 in Italy and 22 in France.

More than 6,000 fatalities have been reported worldwide.

As a result of the increase in cases across the continent, the ECDC has warned that up to 40,000 people could die from swine flu in the current pandemic, with a similar number also predicted to lose their lives in subsequent seasonal flu epidemics next year.

“That is not a trivial number. And the fact that H1N1 is happening in younger adults, pregnant women and people without risk factors makes it feel different,” explained the ECDC’s flu co-ordinator, Angus Nicoll.

The figures emerged as Health Minister Mary Harney confirmed children aged six months to four years, over-65s and all healthcare workers can receive the vaccine from next week.

“This is a national emergency as far as the health services are concerned,” Ms Harney admitted.

“The issues that confront us are no different than issues that confront other health ministries right around the world, particularly in the EU. But I think we have the capacity working together to be able to vaccinate the population as quickly as possible.”

This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, November 07, 2009

Read more: http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/kfauojausnsn/rss2/#ixzz0W8XXtNOC

WASHINGTON – With swine flu continuing to spread around the world, researchers say they have found the reason it is — so far — more a series of local blazes than a wide-raging wildfire. The new virus, H1N1, has a protein on its surface that is not very efficient at binding with receptors in people’s respiratory tracts, researchers at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

“While the virus is able to bind human receptors, it clearly appears to be restricted,” Ram Sasisekharan, lead author of the report, said in a statement.

But flu viruses are known to mutate rapidly, the research team noted, so this one must be watched closely in case it changes to become easier to spread.

Even if it doesn’t mutate, it’s causing plenty of illness here and abroad already — and vaccine makers are working “at full speed” to develop shots for use in the fall if the government deems it enough of a threat, Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious disease director of the National Institutes of Health, said Thursday.

Within a few weeks, Fauci expects to receive the first test batches for government-led studies in volunteers to see if the vaccine triggers signs of immune protection, at what dose and is safe.

The results of those tests will help the U.S. government decide whether to distribute swine flu vaccine in the fall, how much, and whether children or others should be first to get it.

The government wants public input before it makes any decisions, Dr. Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Thursday.

Good news: The swine flu virus circulating today “is molecularly strikingly similar” to the spring’s first cases, making it likely that any vaccine could be “a perfect match,” Fauci added.

Worldwide, more than 300 people have died and more than 70,000 cases have been confirmed, according to the World Health Organization, which last month officially declared the virus a pandemic.

It’s currently flu season in the Southern Hemisphere, and viral spread in Argentina has prompted schools there to give students an early vacation. But swine flu hasn’t abated in the Northern Hemisphere, unusual since influenza usually retreats from summer’s high heat and humidity. Confirmed U.S. cases have reached nearly 34,000 — a fraction of the infected are tested — and deaths rose 34 percent in the past week to hit 170, the CDC said Thursday. England’s health minister said Thursday that his country faces a projected 100,000 new swine flu cases a day by the end of August.

Also Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the U.S. will provide 420,000 treatment courses of the anti-viral medicine Tamiflu to the Pan-American Health Organization to help fight the flu in Latin America and the Caribbean. “All of us have a responsibility to help support one another in the face of this challenge,” Sebelius said at a meeting of health ministers in Mexico.

Sasisekharan’s paper, meanwhile, warned that the H1N1 strain might just need a single change or mutation to make it resistant to Tamiflu.

The researchers also noted that the new virus is more active in the gastrointestinal tract than seasonal flu, leading to intestinal distress and vomiting in about 40 percent of those infected.

The research was funded by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology and the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences.

___

AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.

On the Net:

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The new H1N1 influenza strain may be just a little less catching than seasonal flu, but seems a little better able to cause stomach upsets, researchers reported on Thursday.

Genetic analysis and lab experiments with the virus show it lacks a piece of genetic material that makes ordinary flu viruses so transmissible, a team of U.S. researchers found.

Researchers in the Netherlands, meanwhile, found it lives very well in the nose and their findings suggest it has the ability to stay around for a long time — and get worse.

Both studies, published in the journal Science, show that H1N1 swine flu needs to be closely watched, said Dr. Terrence Tumpey of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I think the take-home message is that we really need to keep a close eye on this virus,” Tumpey said in a telephone interview.

Last month the World Health Organization declared a pandemic of the new swine flu. It has been confirmed in more than 77,000 people globally and has killed at least 332 people, but U.S. officials have said there are likely a million or more cases in the United States alone.

Although flu season usually ends in April in the Northern Hemisphere, the new virus is still causing widespread illness and it is actively in the mix of seasonal flu viruses now circulating during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.

Tumpey and colleagues tested samples of the new virus from a California child who recovered from a mild bout with the new flu, a Texas child who died and a Mexican woman who had severe disease.

They compared it to ordinary, seasonal H1N1 flu, testing it in ferrets, which develop flu in ways similar to humans.

The ferrets did not catch the new swine flu from one another as easily as they catch ordinary viruses, Tumpey said. Usually, if a ferret is infected with human flu, it infects all other ferrets in nearby cages. But with the new H1N1, only six out of nine animals became infected.

HOUSEHOLD SPREAD

Usually 20 percent to 30 percent of household members are infected by a single flu patient but H1N1 swine flu may have a lower transmission rate, Tumpey said.

In addition, all previous pandemic flu strains — from 1918, 1957 and 1968 — have had a specific genetic sequence in a gene called PB2. The new H1N1 does not have this particular mutation, Tumpey said.

He said health officials should keep an eye out for it, as the change may signal the virus is gaining the ability to spread more quickly and easily than it already does. Researchers are also watching for signs the virus has developed mutations that allow it to resist antiviral drugs — and have found two instances so far, one in Japan and one in Denmark.

In addition, Tumpey’s team found mutations that let the new H1N1 virus live in the small intestine — something seasonal influenza cannot do. This may explain why so many swine flu patients have stomach upsets such as nausea and diarrhea, the researchers said.

In the other report, Ron Fouchier and colleagues at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam found the virus lived well in ferrets and spread very easily from one to another.

In fact, ferrets shed more virus with new H1N1 than with seasonal flu — meaning more of it came out of their noses, Fouchier’s team found.

Ferrets inoculated with the new swine flu virus were a little sicker and took a little longer to recover than ferrets infected with seasonal H1N1.

“These data suggest that the 2009A(H1N1) influenza virus has the ability to persist in the human population, potentially with more severe clinical consequences,” they wrote.

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

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Why Swine Flu Differs From Seasonal Flu

출처 : 포브스 07.02.09, 02:00 PM EDT http://www.forbes.com/feeds/hscout/2009/07/02/hscout628674.html?feed=rss_forbeslife_health

Pandemic virus affects lungs and stomach, whereas seasonal flu doesn’t, researchers say