What were your Mom's symptoms exactly?
How - if at all - were they different from standard cold or 'flu?

Pete

H1N1 peer pressure in NYC:

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local-bea...y-68801572.html

Swine Flu Fears Lead to Girl-on-Girl Brawl on D Train

By BRIAN RIES

Updated 10:41 AM EST, Tue, Nov 3, 2009

After a rough spring that saw as many as 20 to 40 percent of New Yorkers exposed to H1N1, subway riders have resorted to defending themselves with their fists.

Violence struck on a southbound D train Monday morning after two women got into an argument over one's refusal to cover her mouth while coughing. It ended with her spitting on the other, a punch, and the second woman dragging the first to the floor of the car by her hair.

1. I said assumed H1N1. My mom hasn't entered the hospital for treatment, or been diagnosed with H1N1. We say assumed because a. Mom has her standard flu shot several weeks ago b. she has been volunteering as a library reading tutor to a child in elementary school who was diagnosed with actual A/H1N1 just prior to Mom going down.

2. there are no separate symptoms for A/H1N1 - flu is flu. Mom's symptoms include coughing, sore throat, runny nose, fever, weakness. She's a 79 year old woman, and at the moment needs to be helped out of the bed to go to the bathroom. For 3 days she couldn't manage that. No appetite, but she is keeping up on fluids and weak digestables.

In the end I don't give a hoot what brand of flu she has - alot of folks have it right now, and it is generally severe enough to take precautions from getting it yourself, but also requires some time from all of us to care for people who are down with the flu. As pandemics are supposed to go, this one is working out pretty much as expected.

It's impossible to really say, without testing, whether someone had H1N1 versus some other flu strain (and there are others out there, but not common right now, like an H3N2 strain) versus something entirely different which also gives you flu-like symptoms.

One difference between H1N1 and your typical seasonal flu is more nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea with many H1N1 cases. But then again, there are other bugs out there that can give you these symptoms. Additionally, a certain percentage of H1N1 cases don't develop a fever, which is unusual. So, it's very hard to diagnose H1N1 based solely on symptoms.

And unless you had a laboratory confirmed case of H1N1, no one should assume that they're already immune to H1N1 because they presumably just got over a case of it. In reality, you may not have even been infected with influenza at all.

There was that CBS news report recently where they tallied lab results from state labs. A rather eye opening report, actually. We've been hearing that the CDC's own lab has consistently found almost only H1N1 in the samples it tests. But from April through June, these state labs showed remarkably few H1N1 cases in their samples. Very odd. Without knowing more about the underlying data, that's very conflicting results. There's probably a good explanation, but reports like that really must make life difficult for the health authorities who are trying to keep up some momentum with the vaccine campaign, public awareness about hand washing, etc.

Along the same lines, there was a new study just out yesterday pointing out that old folks are actually at rather high risk of dying BUT out of those actually hospitalized. Few older folks are being hospitalized for H1N1, but the general message seems to be that suddenly old folks are at high risk. Which may make the older generation suddenly flock to flu clinics and demand their H1N1 shots all of a sudden, putting even more strain on flu vaccine supplies. Yeah, must be a headache for public health authorities.

Whatever it is, we're treating the symptoms, and its been manageable. And Mom is doing pretty well right now, she is sitting up and having actual breakfast after keeping down her dinner last night, and called my wife this morning for her xxth birthday.

Here's an interesting chart on some of the details on swine flu:
http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/piggy-trouble/?display=wide

The key information is in the lower right corner just above the text: "Fear of swine flu vs. knowledge."