Tuesday 28 April 2009

Is Swine Flu Causing Cytokine Storms?

Scientists investigating the 1918-1919 "Spanish Flu" pandemic believe that that strain of H1N1 influenza caused so much damage partly by causing victim's immune system to go into overdrive.
Researchers exhumed bodies that were buried in permafrost in Alaska and Canada, and managed to isolate the virus. When primates were infected with this strain, the scientists observed massive spikes in cytokines.
Cytokines are produced by cells when they become infected by a virus. They act as a signal to the body's immune system which then sends antibodies to that area.
The problems caused by the Spanish Flu virus were because it was such a new and unusual strain. The victims cells produced cytokines at a much higher rate, and affected organs were flooded by antibodies. Influenza is a respiratory illness and infected patients lungs were flooded with so many antibodies that their lungs were overwhelmed, ultimately leading to pneumonia.
The current outbreak seems to be affecting healthy young adults most severely, so it seems that it may be harming people via a similar mechanism.
The danger is as the virus resides in more hosts there is a much greater risk of the virus exchanging genetic material with other strains of influenza. Could this make the virus even more exotic to the immune system, and make "cytokine storms" more severe?

Deputy WHO Chief: "Containment Is Not An Option"




The WHO yesterday raised it's pandemic alert level to Phase 4:
Phase 4: Verified human-to-human transmission able to cause community-level outbreaks. Significant increase in risk of a pandemic.
The deputy chief of the WHO, Dr Keiji Fukuda, said that the virus was so widespread that "containment is not an option" and that governments should concentrate on mitigating it's effects. According to the WHO, all it will take to progress to phase 6, the most serious, is:
  • human to human transmission confirmed in another country other than Mexico.
  • the virus to spread to another country in a different region.
Phase 5: Human-to-human transmission in at least two countries. Strong signal pandemic imminent
Phase 6: Virus spreads to another country in a different region. Global pandemic under way.

See also: Are We About To See The Next Flu Pandemic

UPDATE: There may be human-to-human, or community transmission in the USA. If this is confirmed we can expect Phase 5 shortly.

Sunday 26 April 2009

Are We About To See The Next Flu Pandemic?


On Tuesday, April 21, the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) issued an alert that there had been two cases of swine flu in humans in California. On April 23 the Mexican government confirmed that the recent spate of flu like illnesses in Mexico were connected to this strain of swine flu.
Today cases of swine flu have been reported in Canada, with more suspected in New Zealand, Spain, France, UK, Israel, Columbia and Brazil. So far the virus may have killed 86 people, all in Mexico - although it is difficult to confirm the precise strain in each case. At the moment the picture isn't entirely clear, but it seems that this new and virulent strain of flu is spreading across the globe.
It should be made clear that this is by no means a pandemic at the moment; but does it have the potential to develop into one? From Wikipedia, these are the 3 conditions that the WHO says are needed for a pandemic to develop:

  1. Emergence of a disease new to a population.
  2. Agents infect humans, causing serious illness.
  3. Agents spread easily and sustainably among humans.

Although there have been outbreaks of swine flu before, this one is a novel strain, containing genetic material from swine flu from North America, Europe and Asia, along with elements of bird flu and common human flu. This is a result of different strains of the flu virus co-existing in the same host, where they swap genetic material. This is a new disease.
The strain can clearly infect humans, and be passed from human to human. Non of the victims from outside Mexico seem to have had any contact with infected pigs, although all at this stage have recently returned from Mexico. The relatively high mortality rate in Mexico makes this a serious illness. Even if all the suspected cases were confirmed (many may be more common flu, or flu like illnesses) the mortality rate would be about 6%, compared with the the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 - 1919 which is believed to have had a mortality rate of 2.5% - 5%.
The strain does seem to be able to spread easily amongst humans, the scale of infection in Mexico suggests this. The question is can it spread sustainably? There are still only a handful of cases outside Mexico, and if these can be contained and controlled then a global pandemic may be averted, although the apparent scale of the infection in Mexico would still present a high risk.
So the outbreak certainly isn't a pandemic yet, and hopefully it won't become one, but the risk is there, and the WHO, CDC and governments and health care agencies around the world will be working very hard to fight this.

For now the advice is simple: maintain high levels of personal hygiene - wash your hands more frequently and more thoroughly, and if you fell ill with flu like symptoms stay at home - don't go to work, university, school, etc. but stay at home and seek medical help if your condition worsens.

You can keep up to date by following these on twitter:
@BreakingNews
@mpoppel - covering various news conferences etc. for BreakingNews.
@CDCemergency
@healthmap

Perfect F1 Experience: BBC & Tweetdeck

I've just watched the fantastic Bahrain Grand Prix and thoroughly enjoyed seeing a great win by Jenson Button, along with a solid performance by Lewis Hamilton. The BBC coverage was fantastic, particularly the Red Button interactive features.
It was also the first time I've really used TweetDeck. I installed it a few days ago and really liked the ability to have a persistant search coloumn. What I didn't like was the notification pop-up. I use twhirl on a day-to-day basis and like the way that I can set it to show each tweet in the notification so I don't have to pull up the application window. TweetDeck only shows a summary - "3 new notifications", so I have to pull up the window each time to read a tweet. For this reason I've decided to stick with twhirl.
Today though, whilst watching the Grand Prix I used TweetDeck a bit differently. I turned off updates, so as not to use up API calls and kept twhirl running as usual. I then used TweetDeck purely for searches. I wanted to follow tweets with the #f1 tag, and being a Hamilton fan wanted to follow #Hamilton too. I set up two search coloumns, one searching for each tag.
This gave me a rolling update from thousands of people, and really helped me keep up to speed with the race. People on twitter caught things that the commentators missed, and expressed some interesting (and sometimes humorous) comments.
Will definately be doing it this way again, the only problem is getting Sundays off work!

Saturday 25 April 2009

Formula 1 Is Interesting Again

There has been quite a lot of controversy over some of the rule changes rules changes prior to the 2009 F1 season. KERS, super-soft compound tyres and aerodynamic changes have all received a mixed response from the drivers, teams and fans.
After the first few races though, I think that these changes along with the changes from previous seasons like "shoot-out" qualifying have made the sport much more interesting. The teams that have decided to use KERS seem to have had varying degrees of sucess, with some teams ditching it altogether - the first being Ferrari ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix.
The one worry I have is that the sport is becoming too complex for new fans to be able to follow. With all this talk about KERS and rear diffusers it could be quite baffling for someone watching for the first time.
For veteran fans though 2009 is shaping up to be a great season, Hamilton the underdog, Red Bull with a great car and a fantastic young driver in Vettel, and the once written off Jenson Button driving for the new, but already championship leading BrawnGP. The problem I have is knowing which team I'm rooting for, McLaren, Red Bull or Brawn; either way, I can't wait for the race tomorrow.

Saturday 11 April 2009

Twitter

After using Twitter (with twhirl) for about two days, I think I've identified the three ways which I use it (at least at the moment).

  • Messaging friends (although most of my friends are Luddites who don't use twitter yet!). It feels like a halfway-house between Facebook chat and email. Using Facebook chat can sometimes be quite stressful as I often feel under pressure to give a prompt response, which can be quite distracting. Also I have to be on Facebook, as does the friend I'm trying to contact. Also it seems to disconnect quite often, which sucks.
  • Getting news updates. I use an RSS reader for keeping up with blogs, and it has pop-up notifications, but for some reason I like getting news through Twitter. It feels more like a continuous stream of information, and feels more "live".
  • Thinking out loud. Earlier today I was in the queue at my bank, feeling a bit impatient, and I just felt like Tweeting "I don't like queuing". It just felt like something I'd like to share.
My current Twitter setup is:
  • Twitter: Obviously.
  • twhirl: A desktop client that means I don't have to be on the Twitter web page constantly.
  • Ping.fm: a web service that broadcasts my tweets to other services, such as Facebook (my Facebook status is now my latest tweet - good for my Luddite friends mentioned earlier), and this blog.
  • Mobile phone: for tweeting via SMS.