Swine Flu Alerts

It's time to stock up on hand sanitizers and tissues; flu season is upon us. Every year in the U.S. more than 200,000 people are hospitalized and 36,000 die from flu-related complications. While it's too soon to tell how extensive this year's flu outbreak might be, there's a complicating factor this season: the H1N1 virus.

H1NI, known colloquially as "swine flu," started showing up in patients last spring. In June, the World Health Organization declared swine flu a pandemic. By late August, the agency said there were more than 210,000 cases of swine flu and at least 2,185 deaths worldwide. The WHO cautions, however, that these numbers may be grossly under-reported because hard-hit countries have quit counting individual cases.

Over the summer, a handful of large pharmaceutical companies including Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis began working on a vaccine. On Sept. 15, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave Norvatis and Sanofi the green light to start producing their vaccine strains. Although vaccines won't be available to the public until mid-October, many people are currently contemplating whether or not they should get the H1N1 shot.

According to guidelines drafted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are five key populations that should be vaccinated against the H1N1 virus:

• Pregnant women


• People who live with or care for children younger than 6 months of age


• Children and young people between the ages of 6 months and 24 years


• Health care workers and emergency medical service providers


• People between 25 and 64 years of age who have chronic medical disorders or compromised immune systems.

The above groups account for approximately 159 million Americans. The CDC urges these at-risk populations to get both the swine flu shot and the seasonal flu shot. (The regular flu shot doesn't protect against the H1N1 virus.) So what should the remaining half of the U.S. population do this flu season? The answer isn't clear, especially in light of the 1976 swine flu debacle.

In 1976, a 19-year-old Army private stationed in Fort Dix , N.J. , died from the swine flu, while another 115 soldiers stationed there tested positive for swine flu antibodies. The CDC was called in to investigate, and its scientists concluded that the soldiers had a strain similar to the Spanish Influenza of 1918, which was responsible for the deadliest human pandemic of the 20th century. Although the virus hadn't spread beyond the fort, the CDC convinced then-president Gerald Ford's advisors that a mass inoculation was required. Pharmaceutical companies rushed to develop a vaccine.