can't breathe....

[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

Am so fucking stuffed up that I can't close my mouth at all, I need it to breathe. Which is quite a problem since my throat is as parched as a desert and I need to keep drinking water every 2 minutes, or I swear that it will shred and bleed and crack. Mom and sis have taken to their beds with the flu. I have sinusitis, not the flu, but Lord, its no fun. My fucking tonsils were swollen as hell for gods sake.


Being sick sucks.


Have some informative articles on the flu and your government's preparedness for the same while I try to figure out a way to swallow without feel as if I am suffocating...
Flu And You - Part I

Let's be clear: what makes it a bad flu season is if you (or your family) get it. With that in mind, let's talk about the upcoming flu season, what you need to know about it, and (more next week in Part II) relate it to pandemics and pandemic preparedness and what you need to know about that.
How do we know flu season is coming? It comes every year around this time, from Florida to Maine. Flu can hit any time between November and March, but the last few years, February has been the month.

The seasonal flu impact is huge. And just imagine our straining health care system as is... and then add a seasonal flu epidemic (data from CDC.)MORE

Flu And You - Part II

Here's a Voice of America article also spotlighting one of the potentially big problems, an influenza pandemic (a worldwide outbreak of a novel flu virus capable of infecting humans everywhere.)

The United States is concerned that the ongoing outbreaks of H5N1 avian influenza in birds, or bird flu, have the potential to turn into a human influenza pandemic. Whenever or wherever a pandemic begins, everyone around the world will be at risk.
To fuel a pandemic, a virus must be able to easily spread from person to person. And although currently the H5N1 virus does not spread easily from human to human, its mortality rate in humans is so high-over 60 percent-that we cannot take the chance that it will not do so in the future. Several influenza pandemics have occurred during the last century. The pandemic in 1918-1919 spread to every continent, and caused at least 40 million deaths world wide.
The effects of a pandemic can be lessened if preparations are made ahead of time. Working through the International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza, the U.S. Government and others in the international community have developed national and international programs to prevent, detect, and limit the spread of the avian flu virus.
Central to that effort is building infrastructure, including laboratory capacity and international rapid response mechanisms; a global surveillance and warning system; a coordinated plan of intervention; and of course, the development of vaccines. The U.S. has pledged $ 949 million in support of these efforts.MORE

Flu And You - Part III

DemFromCT: So speaking of flu pandemics, what are the chances we will have a catastrophic flu pandemic in the near future?
No one can predict this. I don't take it as a given and never have. It's true that pandemics happen at intervals, although there is no rhyme or reason governing how long the interval is. We don't understand the dynamics of this virus well at all and the world has changed in many ways. Most of the ways the world has changed involve a closer interconnectedness that would make spread easier and more rapid, so I'm not heartened by the fact that the world is different than it was in 1918 or 1957 or 1968, the years of the last three pandemics. But we also don't understand what makes some years much worse than others and some pandemics much worse than others. We don't even know the major mode of contagion and for some flu virus subtypes, like H5N1, we can't be confident we know all the current or potential reservoirs in nature.
We've learned a lot since H5N1 returned in full force in 2003, but much of what we've learned is that what we thought we knew we were wrong about. This is a wily and dangerous enemy and it's a race between gaining effective knowledge to treat and control it (which we don't have at the moment) and the continual experimenting the virus is doing to find ever new ways to make copies of itself, its only meaningful activity from the virus's perspective.
I think it is quite plausible we will have another pandemic from some influenza subtype humans have no immunity to that will still be non-catastrophic, more like 1968 or 1957. Those were bad but not like 1918. On the other hand, it is also perfectly plausible we could have a truly terrible pandemic with high mortality and horrendous social disruption. It doesn't have to be H5N1. There are other flu and non-flu possibilities in a world where the most remote spot is not more than an incubation period from an international airport. Given that, it would be prudent to build our public health and social service systems like brick houses instead of the houses of straw and stick we have today.MORE

Flu And You - Part IV

DemFromCT: Well if you aren’t going to use the dominant paradigm for public health, what are you suggesting public health is?
I don’t have a fully developed answer, so instead let me give an illustration of the kind of alternative answer that hard thinking might provide. It might not be the right one but it's an illustration. Then maybe we can get back to the infrastructure questions.
A colleague once referred to a nice definition of public policy as those things we as a community have chosen to do for each other (I wish I knew a source to credit). We could also say about public health that it consists of those things that we as a community have chosen to do for each other with regard to our physical and mental well-being. This is quite different than the risk factor approach to public health. It shifts the emphasis to politics by putting what we as a community choose to do, not for ourselves, but for each other. It also allows a more nuanced answer to what physical and mental well-being is because it leaves it more open. Political leadership is obviously critical because what a community in a democracy decides it wants to do is always heavily influenced (although not determined) by where its leaders are taking it.
So what should we choose to do for each other? I have two kinds of answers. One is that we should do things that will produce the kind of world I want to live in. I don’t want to live in a world full of sick and miserable people. I want to live in a world where people, by and large, are satisfied and happy. But maybe that’s just me and my conception of a good world. We do this kind of thing a lot. MORE

Flu And You - Part V

Interestingly, at the beginning of the week I spent two days with scientists and public health officials from all over the world who are experts on the topic of pandemic and seasonal flu. And guess what? Everyone in the room, from the White House to WHO, was concerned about a pandemic flu. There was some consternation at the meeting about Tom Daschle withdrawing (both nature and scientists abhor a vacuum.) And there was a good deal of concern about the fate of public health funding in this stimulus bill. Ultimately, the meeting was about science and policy.
The science meetings were sponsored by IDSA (the Infectious Disease Society of America), who have been involved in pandemic influenza preparedness since at least 2005. Back then, Dr. Andew Pavia (the chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center and Primary Children's Hospital) was also chair of IDSA's Pandemic Task Force (after a stint on the public policy committee, he's back on the Task Force.) In testimony to Congress (.pdf) ^*, Dr. Pavia noted the fragility of our nation’s vaccine supply, and the importance of bolstering R&D, which is where most of the pandemic dollars in the stimulus would go. In addition, a need for antiviral R&D, stockpiling and distribution plans was identified in 2005.MORE