Regional
(2009-05-04)
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COLORADO
(KUNC) -
Four cases of swine flu have been confirmed in Colorado. One of those cases is in a student at Excel Academy in Arvada; as a precaution, officials at the school have called off classes this week. Medical experts continue to say that prevention is best the medicine.
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In case you're wondering if "swine flu" sounds familiar, it does. At least it should sound familiar if you were old enough to form conscious memories in 1976, which was the last time a virus named after a pig scared the bejesus out of us.
Gerald Ford, was president. As VP, Ford had succeeded Nixon, who'd resigned over embarrassment about the Watergate affair. Ford wasn't re-elected, in large part due to perceived impropriety in his having given his ex-boss a full presidential pardon.
Some say Ford might still have beaten Jimmy Carter if the swine flu epidemic that had threatened earlier in that election year had really materialized. Ford's administration took a very aggressive stand against this tiny virus, proclaiming the goal of immunizing just about every American.
Fortunately for everybody but the president, who would have been a hero if he'd really headed it off, a pandemic failed to appear. To make matters worse, over 500 people developed Guillan-Barre syndrome, a very serious paralytic illness, as a complication of the flu shot it turned out they hadn't really needed.
The reason we got so uptight about the 1976 version of swine flu virus is that it looked a lot like the organism that had caused the death of tens of millions of people (including my grandfather's mother and sister and niece) in 1918. The 2009 model looks just as scary. It's the product of a radical reshuffling of viral proteins between humans and pigs, with a few pieces of bird virus thrown in too. The organism's novel coat has the potential to elude the immune systems of large swaths of the human population, causing widespread severe infections.
Today's version of swine flu has established a foothold in Mexico, with over a thousand possible cases and at least twenty deaths so far. Most of the Mexican citizens who have died this time around as a result of influenza complications have been young, previously healthy adults, similar to the pattern of deaths in the wake of the 1918 pandemic.
So far, in our country the infection has reared its ugly head in California and New York, with a few cases scattered among several other states, including Colorado. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility of an epidemic here, made more likely by the amount of traffic between our state and Mexico.
What should you do? Stay away from people who have a respiratory illness. And if you get sick, try not to expose others.
In these extraordinary times, it's dangerous to assume that a cold is just a cold. If you develop cough, sore throat, fever and muscle aches, see a healthcare provider immediately. There are anti-viral drugs that really can help you fight off influenza. But you have to start taking medication early in the course of the illness. The test that confirms the flu diagnosis (done on a sample collected by a simple, painless swab taken from inside the nostril) will also provide very important information to the public health officials whose job it is to identify and manage an epidemic.
There is no vaccine to take today that will protect you against swine flu. The bug has taken us by surprise. If we're lucky this particular virus will simply have too little clout to cause an epidemic or even to make or break a presidential career. © Copyright 2012, KUNC
