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Though reported Swine Flu cases have dwindled over the summer months, the Centers for Disease Control warns that a full-blown pandemic is on the horizon as fall inaugurates the 2009-2010 Flu Season, mirroring the progression of the 1918 Spanish Influenza. Now, with the advent of vaccines and medical technologies, as well as improved personal and public hygiene, communities are better equipped to control the spread of infectious disease. As the nation waits for the release of the H1N1 vaccine, ScienceBloggers weigh in on the implications, applications, and ethics of preventing, tracking, and controlling disease. Respectful Insolence discusses both the World Health Organization's vehement dismissal of homeopathic remedies in health care, as well as the rise of infectious diseases as vaccination rates fall. On A Blog Around the Clock, technology and medicine meet in PLoS Currents: Influenza, a "Google Knol hosted collection of rapid communications about the swine flu." Mike the Mad Biologist gets back to basics, discussing personal hygiene and easy flu etiquette such as "not spraying your snot hither and yon."
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Above from: http://scienceblogs.com/seed/2009/08/the_buzz_ramping_up_for_fall_h.php

That'd be a catchy Public Service Announcement:


"...not spraying your snot hither and yon."

The bloggers on http://scienceblogs.com are smart and quite creative. Their ability to turn a phrase and use humor, along with the factual and scientific basis for their observations, increases their value and makes them entertaining.

Or the UK reported infection rate is wrong. What you wrote there bothered me a lot, and I've several times tried to authenticate the figures, but without much success. Part of the problem is that the rise in reported infection rate coincided with differences in methodology. Early infections were confirmed by a local doctor doing blood tests. Now they have a "swine flu hotline" here, which you can phone if you think you have it. You get diagnosed over the phone and are then authorised to get Tamiflu.

The diagnosis is unreliable. Apparently the official figures are 5% of the hotline figures: ie 95% of the people given Tamiflu in England don't need it (and possibly do have some other illness which needs some other medication they aren't getting). Sometimes they send out swab kits which the patient is supposed to administer and send back, and those provide a statistical check - that's where the 5% comes from. Except it's highly variable - eg 10% some weeks, 5% others. There is probably bias in the samples. People who are feeling better are less likely to send back their swabs.

It still seems like there was a surge in July, and a tailing off in August. However, I'm now getting that from the death rate - presumably death statistics are a lot more reliable. For example Wolfram|Alpha shows a steep rise in the second half of July. That must have been preceded by a rise in infection rate, and probably it was that rise which triggered the Hotline launch, but I wouldn't like to put any figures on how big it actually was, and I don't trust the NHS figures.

(PS this is really just England and Wales - Scotland has a different system.)

The NHS did just revise it's H1N1 projections. I don't know about the infection rate, but their worst case mortality figure dropped from 65,000 to 19,000. Worst case. I can't emphasize that enough. Whenever you see these ranges, like from 3,000 to 30,000, everyone always latches onto that big number and then starts thinking that that's the number to expect.

Fancy tools for tracking the flu:

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/09/02/fancy-tools-for-tracking-the-flu/

So.
How many of us have had the swine flu so far?
I can't be sure without actual testing but I think I know three people who were sick with it.

Not me.

My 7 yr old nephew in Richmond, Virginia is just getting over it. His parents sent him to school yesterday because he didn't have a fever the evening before (they had been giving Tylenol which probably supressed his temp). Anyway, he had a fever when he got to school and lasted there about six seconds before he was sent home. The school had some choice words for the parents. I think the lesson is - wait 24 hrs after no fever and no medicine that might lower fever.

Someone who has gotten the flu recently probably had H1N1. It's a highly infectious bugger. As is typical with pandemic strains, it tends to squeeze out any of the other seasonal flu strains.

There was that experiment with ferrets reported the other day. Interesting results. One result was that ferrets co-infected with H1N1 and a seasonal strain would only pass along the H1N1 infection to other ferrets. So, not only do pandemic strains out compete other strains by being more infectious, they seem to also block other strains from getting passed along.

Well, the bigger bit of news from that same experiment was that there was no evidence of any co-mingling of genetics info (aka mutating) within the ferrets co-infected with two different strains. That's where the various headlines about "No evidence of superbug" came from recently.

That said, it's always hit or miss to know whether you've had the flu since many other bugs can produce similar symptoms. But it was probably H1N1.