New York Records Second H1N1 Flu Death

Woman In Her 50s, Like Most U.S. H1N1 Victims, Had Multiple Underlying Health Conditions

(AP)  A woman died over the weekend of H1N1 (swine) flu, becoming the New York City's second victim and the nation's 11th.

The woman, who was in her 50s, had other health conditions, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene spokeswoman Jessica Scaperotti said. No other information on her case was disclosed Sunday.

Assistant public school principal Mitchell Wiener, who died May 17, was the city's first death from the virus. The 55-year-old had been sick for several days.

There were 280 confirmed cases of swine flu in the city and 94 hospitalizations as of Sunday, Scaperotti said. The number of confirmed cases probably doesn't fully reflect the spread of the virus, given that health officials aren't testing everyone for the H1N1 strain.

"It's most likely that if you're sick with the flu, that you have the H1N1 virus," Scaperotti said.

Those people with chronic health conditions such as diabetes and compromised immune systems who are suffering from flu-like symptoms should seek medical advice, Scaperotti said. Only those with more serious symptoms, such as shortness of breath, should go to emergency rooms, she said.

The health department recommended that physicians prescribe anti-flu drugs such as Tamiflu over the phone to patients with mild flu symptoms who have other health conditions.

Scaperotti said that as the virus spreads "we are going to see more increases of severe illness." She said that each year more than 1,000 people die of seasonal flu in the city.

The city's first outbreak of swine flu occurred about a month ago, when more than 1,000 teenagers at a Catholic high school in Queens began falling ill following the return of several students from vacations in Mexico, where the virus was first detected.

The virus has coursed through the city's schools and even reached its jail system, where inmates' visiting hours have been limited and hand sanitizer passed around. On Thursday, correction officials said they would sanitize a 2,600-inmate jail on Rikers Island.

The World Health Organization, as of Friday, had tallied more than 12,000 swine flu cases worldwide, with more than half of them in the United States. It counted at least 86 deaths, with 75 of those in Mexico.

Eighteen U.S. soldiers infected with swine flu have recovered after treatment on an American base in Kuwait and left the country, a Kuwaiti health official said Sunday.

"They were treated and they have fully recovered," said Youssef Mandakar, deputy head of Kuwait's public health department. He said the soldiers had shown "mild symptoms" of the disease upon their arrival at an Air Force base.

Kuwaiti authorities confirmed that the soldiers came from the United States but would not say where they had gone, adding that the troops had no contact with the local population and were treated at U.S. military facilities.

Ibrahim Abdul-Hadi, an undersecretary at the Health Ministry, said the U.S. military had examined and quarantined a number of soldiers who mixed with the infected ones.

Kuwait is a major ally of Washington and a logistics base for U.S. military personnel serving in Iraq.

Raad Mahmoud, a spokesman for the Iraqi Health Ministry, said precautions are being taken at airports and border entry points, but he said Iraqi authorities have no authority over U.S. troops and the foreigners who enter with them. He said the U.S. military has to administer medical tests to everybody when they enter the country and the military must present the reports to the ministry.

U.S. Army Maj. Jose Lopez, a military spokesman, said there were no reported cases of swine flu among American troops in Iraq.

Poland's Chief Sanitary Inspectorate on Sunday confirmed the country's third case of swine flu in a 21-year-old who had just returned to Poland from the United States.

Jan Bondar, the spokesman for the state office, said the man returned on Friday and presented himself at a hospital for testing after getting a call from a friend in Washington whom he had spent time with and who had contracted the virus.

The Pole's condition is not serious, Bondar said.

[gaye5]

Hey, we close schools because of so called the swine flu, so why are hospitals not closed down as according to the America medical journal Dr's are the 4thcause of death in America.. I dont know what it is today but the American medical journal says...

One in five children in the USA has a chronic illness. The figure has trebled in the last 20 years, (Source: Journal of the American Medical Association, 2007; 297: 2755-9). Surely this makes people start to wonder about all the so called help drugs, etc are giving them.
Then there is ..
Doctors Are The Third Leading Cause of Death in the US, Causing 250,000 Deaths Every Year..
Journal American Medical Association Vol 284 July 26, 2000

And they worry about swine flu..

Of 13 countries in a recent comparison, the United States ranks an average of 12th (second from the bottom) for 16 available health indicators.

The April 15th, 1998 Journal of the American Medical Association reported that there are more than 2,000,000 drug "reactions" annually in the United States, and that more than 100,000 of these reactions are fatal., So with the increase in pharmaceutical drugs I wonder what the death rate is now..

[hetup-2009]

willow0313 should be in the presidents cabinet, later run for president, what a brilliant well spoken mind

[glenaw-2009]

I wonder.

If we did nothing and tens of thousands died then everyone would say, after the fact, we did not react enough. If we react with great panic and nothing happens then we shouldn't have done what we did.

The pandemic of 1918 killed hundreds of thousands of people. This current problem is not over. If it does end without killing a lot of people then that's great. Just hope that the people that die isn't you or someone you love.

Another pandemic will come and depending on what we do or what we don't do will dictate the severity of it.

So lets all second guess everything hide our heads in the sand and do nothing......it will just all go away anyway right?.......

As for the media pumping this.....yes they do. It's the American way.....do anything you can to make a buck. On the forums you can see many reactions from fear to calm thought.......from people staying on the subject at hand to the people that always make it the fault of the political parties......and as we do this the Host of the forum, CBS, reading our posts and trying to figure out a way to raise the level more........the more posts they have the better ratings they have.

I know that I have been very sarcastic here and I apologies for that. It becomes very difficult when so many people do not keep their eye on the ball. With time you will experience the loss of someone and there is no stopping that. To lose some one ...never to see them smile...never to hear their voice....never to walk beside them simply because there are people who will not be careful enough or do not take it seriously enough is beyond me.

Just remember.....people have died and will die because of the H1N1 virus .......that is NOT speculation......wash your hands and keep your hands away from your face.......do things to help prevent catching it.....if you do catch the flu.......cover your mouth when you cough, don't shake peoples hands, limit your contact with people until your over it....to help prevent spreading it.

Just simply taking these actions in themselves may already be keeping this from becoming a epidemic. In some of the history I have read of the flu of 1918 the virus strain mutated to the point of being able to easily enter a hosts body and kill it within twenty-four hours. That is the rub folks. The mutations so far are making the virus more easily transmitted and is becoming more deadly as it progresses with it's mutatting. I know that everyone is comparing it with others modes of death which makes this to seem to be just panic but there is reason for concern and prudent action.

May god be with you, yours and all of us during all of hard times and good times of our walk through life.

Glen

[donttreadonme09]

With all the pork the government shoves down our throats, sooner or later it will make us sick.

[didserve]

:Yawn!

more people died in New York from soured milk!

this is media hype to divert attention from War Crimes

[willow0313]

Can we please stop these stupid articles about the darn swine flu. Like it's real important to point out that 2 people died from Swine flu in NYC, when 10's of thousands of other people die from it daily around the world.

Has news become so pathetic that it can't be something original instead of petty
Posted by ajapierce at 4:26 PM : May 24, 2009
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

280 people get swine flu and everybody wants to wear a mask.

Over a million people have HIV and no one wants to wear a condom!

DUH!!!!!

[willow0313]

Think about this:

1. Cows

2. The Constitution

3. The Ten Commandments
------------------------------------------------------------------------

COWS

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing
that during the mad cow epidemic our government could track
a single cow, born in Canada almost three years ago, right
to the stall where she slept in the state of Washington ?
And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are
unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around
our country. Maybe we should give each of them a cow..

------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE CONSTITUTION

They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for
Iraq .... Why don't we just give them ours? It was
written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for
over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE 10 COMMANDMENTS

The real reason that we can't have the Ten
Commandments posted in a courthouse or Congress is this --
you cannot post 'Thou Shalt Not Steal' 'Thou
Shalt Not Commit Adultery' and 'Thou Shall Not
Lie' in a building full of lawyers, judges and
politicians .... it creates a hostile work environment.

[Livinontheedge]

searingtruth,
Have you been hanging out with dick Cheney again. Your fear mongering is laughable.
You have apparently missed the report by the CDC that people born before 1955 have a natural immunity to this virus as it was on prevailent prior to 1955. You also must have missed the CDC article that says "Tamiflu" will treat this virus and they are making 20 million doses.

[Livinontheedge]

Now tell us New York how many people died last year in your state from the regular flu.
2 deaths from this flu is only 10% of the average death per state for the seasonal fle virus.

[searingtruth]

Fellow citizens,

We are being attacked by a uniquely constructed virus that our immune system does not recognize, and therefore has no defense against. It also appears that it will be difficult to produce a reliable vaccine to defend against it because the antibody receptors (the place that our body chooses to recognize it), changes often, like HIV (AIDS). Our immune system is our bodies defense against all disease, and if it can't recognize an illness then it can't attack it.

The virus we face, H1N1, sometimes called the swine flu, is a previously unknown combination of swine (pig), avian (bird), and human virus that has thus far produced only mild symptoms in humans. Our immune system doesn't recognize it because it has pig and bird components that throw off our immune defenses, which are designed to detect only virus and bacteria with human components. In effect, bird and pig components in a virus act as an "umbrella" that keeps our bodies from seeing them.

But while easy to catch because we have no defense against it, the reason this virus has only caused mild illness so far is because the "payload" (the toxins it produces) are much the same as any other seasonal flu. And so long as it doesn't change we will be fine.

But a virus is inherently unstable, and can mutate (change) incalculable times dependent upon its structure and environment, in only a few days. Changing their payloads lethality like a slot machine, but in this case, one in which we hope will never hit a jackpot.

You see, virus are not actual life as we normally know it, but instead exist outside of living cells as usually single, and sometimes double, strands of something called "RNA".

And RNA is a very interesting and critical substance. Because in normal cells, DNA is transcribed (think of it as translated) to RNA, and RNA is synthesized (actually made) into proteins (the actual product of the cell), often to replicate the cell itself. Things can be more complicated than this, and there can be multiple levels of RNA decoding, but this is the basic mechanism for protein production and cell reproduction. But no matter what steps involved in a cells normal transcription and synthesis processes, it is heavily protected by many levels of "error correction".

This changes when a virus infects a cell. When a virus infects a cell it inserts its RNA into the cells DNA, causing it to produce more copies of the virus itself. However, the insertion of relatively small strands of RNA into complicated strands of DNA almost always lead to "side effects", which make it difficult for the virus to replicate without error. And some virus don't even use a host cells DNA for reproduction, some replicate by RNA alone, which leads to even more replication error.

And these errors are what we know as mutations, which can lead to a virus changing to become completely benign, or globally lethal, or something in between. This is how a virus such as H1N1, which produced relatively mild illness in one flu season, can become globally lethal in another. As did the Spanish flu virus.

But there is even one more caveat of concern here. The H1N1 virus likes to gather RNA from other cells or virus, which only compounds the probability of so many varied mutations that a lethal one is at least minimally probable.

Therefore we must be vigilant and prepared. The warnings of many, including myself, to implement social distancing were not headed, so the spread of H1N1 continues unabated and has now spread into territories where H5N1 (the avian flu with a 60% mortality rate) is widespread, which offers both virus an excellent opportunity to combine and experiment with mutations until they become lethally airborne, inconsequential, or die out completely.

We can hope the latter two are true, but we must be prepared should the virus mutate into a lethally airborne contagion.
ST


"Nature, far from a benign cycle of life, is instead an endless cycle of death. Demanding not only the suffering and lives of the guilty, but also the innocent. Let us strive for improvement."
SearingTruth

A Future of the Brave

[WayAround]

"A woman died over the weekend of swine flu, becoming the New York City's second victim and the nation's 11th."

How many other people died in New York over the weekend? From what causes?

How many other people died in the nation over the weekend? From what causes?

[justsane-2009]

"when 10's of thousands of other people die from it daily around the world. " ajapierce

...actually, this is a new strain. but compared to other flu strains, this is less than negligible. so stop reporting on it like it's the next black plague.

[Newster1]

"when more than 1,000 teenagers at a Catholic high school began falling ill following the return of several students from vacations in Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak. "

LOL guess their god didnt protect them :)

[ajapierce]

Can we please stop these stupid articles about the darn swine flu. Like it's real important to point out that 2 people died from Swine flu in NYC, when 10's of thousands of other people die from it daily around the world.

Has news become so pathetic that it can't be something original instead of petty