CDC Distances Itself from Flu Gloom

(CBS/ AP)  U.S. government health officials are urging Americans not to panic over estimates that up to 90,000 people might die in the United States from swine flu this year.

"Everything we've seen in the U.S. and everything we've seen around the world suggests we won't see that kind of number if the virus doesn't change," Dr. Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a C-SPAN interview taped Wednesday.

While the swine flu seems quite easy to catch, it so far has not been more deadly than the flu strains seen every year during the cold months: many people have only mild illness. Also, close genetic tracking of the new virus as it circled the globe during the past five months so far has shown no sign that it is mutating to become more virulent.

Still, the CDC has been preparing for a worst-case flu season as a precaution - in July working from an estimate slightly more grim than one that made headlines this week - to make sure that if the virus should suddenly worsen or vaccination plans should fall through, health authorities would know how to react.

On Monday the White House released a report from a group of presidential advisers that included a scenario where anywhere from 30 per cent to half the 300 million Americans could catch what doctors call the "2009 H1N1" flu; the extrapolation said death possibilities ranged from 30,000 to 90,000. In a regular flu season, up to 20 per cent of the population is infected and 36,000 die.

"We don't think that's the most likely scenario," CDC flu specialist Dr. Anne Schuchat said of the presidential advisers' high-end tally.

What's really expected this year? CDC will not speculate, finding a numbers game pointless as it tries to balance getting a largely complacent public to listen to its flu instructions without exaggerating the threat.

Along with how the virus itself continues to act, the ultimate toll depends on such things as vaccinations beginning as planned - currently set for mid-October - and whether the people who need them most get them.

CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton reports that the Obama administration is pushing health officials to see if the immunization program can be accelerated.

Under the current plans, people who get their first shots in mid-October wouldn't actually be fully immunized until around Thanksgiving, after booster shots, reports Ashton. She calls the government's goal of immunizing some 195 million Americans by the end of the year, considering manufacturers' capacity to produce the drugs, "definitely ambitious".

CDC also is working to help hospitals keep the not-so-sick from crowding emergency rooms and to properly target anti-flu drugs to the most vulnerable.

What is likely: A busy flu season that starts earlier than usual, Schuchat told The Associated Press. This new H1N1 strain never went away during the summer, infecting children at camps during midyear schools in particular. Already clusters of illnesses are being reported at some schools and colleges around the country.

[erasmus111]

by toldyouso29 August 28, 2009 5:47 AM EDT
....and some will just spout...


Now that would be you. Doesn't matter if anyone is reading it, you just feel the need to spew it. Always know one thing when I see your name. There will be a dozen or more long winded posts right behind it.



"--the idea of no one reading my post is not even a blip."


Hahahaha! Yeah, I can see your mouth moving non-stop. No ones listening but it just keeps on flappin'. What? Do people at home get tired of listening to you, so you have to come on here and let it all out?


"...and try to find a boyfriend and complain about the USA-"


Now how would I get a boyfriend on CBS? I don't need a boyfriend.

And as for complaining about the USA, you guys do enough complaining, whining.....all on your own.

[HGOODGUY]

Up to 90,000 people are supposed to die. As of now nobody has.
You people are just not trying!!!

[Resin-Smoker]

We could do with a good epidemic... Too many people around as it is.

[erasmus111]

by toldyouso29 August 27, 2009 3:05 PM EDT

And you should know this: a flu vaccine is not a guarantee that the flu will not be caught. It is NOT a specific virus per se. It is a cocktail made up of a gamble of what the coming flu might contain. The fact is, you could get this shot and still get the swine flu....



Blah, blah, blah. And you are telling me this WHY? I do already know this.

[erasmus111]

toldyouso29

You are wasting your time going into your long winded, neverending crap, because most people don't read it. Plus a lot of people won't even comprehend what you are saying. A lot don't WANT to comprehend what you are saying.

[toldyouso29]

Catch a clue, little Canadian interloper--we write because we can--no blog ever promised us a readership--some will read and learn and some will just spout and try to find a boyfriend and complain about the USA--the latter would be of your ilk--so be it--all of it is irrelevant to the postings and on my care-o-meter--the idea of no one reading my post is not even a blip. LOL

[erasmus111]

by AmericaDotCom August 27, 2009 7:22 PM EDT
We're not like Canadians, we DO know how to wash.


Yeah? Then how come you've got so many more people getting the flu?

[toldyouso29]

So , if you can understand why we vaccinate (to introduce diseases in a weak or killed state to give the body a heads up) then you can understand these facts:

1. Vaccines do not prevent a disease from infecting a body. You may be exposed anyway. It just prevents (hopefully) the disease from being able to take hold and make you appreciably sick. When it enters, it is immediately recognized and destroyed --often without the person ever knowing they were really ill. That is the good side of vaccines

2. We are all being hypersensitized and more prone to allergies now than any other time in history with asthma and other autoimmune diseases up by over 200% since 1980. What does this mean? It means it is easier for a lot of us to have an overreaction in our body.

3. Most people do not realize that to die due to a disease may mean the body did not react fast enough (because it failed to recognize a disease as threatening ) OR the body killed itself by attacking itself.

4. When a person is filled with fluid (edema) in their cells and lungs there is a huge chance that this is evidence of an allergic reaction. You can literally drown in your own fluids. Mucous is nothing more than the debris from the fire fight between your body and something else. Sometimes it just might be between your body and your body. (Macrophages are a kind of killer protection cell we have that eats other cells or bacteria or viruses) Macrophages also eat the dead or dying macrophages too.

Yep. It's a war out there or rather, in your body--just be careful in buying into a certain strategy, you understand the terrain, the limits and the dangers of the strategies and for God's sake--stop giving all of your power, trust or livelihood to others who you think know more than you do--get informed, every year Doctors and hospitals and others put their patients in harm's way--in the most severe and fatal cases, the patient trusted the doctor and did not bother to ever question or challenge what was going on around them. Everybody tries to make their profession more exalted and harder than it is--everyone should understand the general ideas of why vaccines work, why antibiotics work (or don't) what allergies are and what medicines can do and cannot do inside all of that.

[toldyouso29]

THINGS PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE 'FLU.

1. there are thousands of viruses that cause influenza and they mutate daily

2. EAch year, epidemiologists and virologists track the flu and decide what vaccines will be made based on the liklihood of a certain group attacking the most. They usually choose 3 kinds to go into a 'flu cocktail.

3. The 'flu usually kills those with compromised immunities, like the very young, the very old and those with poor immunity.

4. compromised immunity, means for some reason (usually illness like HIV or autoimmune diseases) your body cannot marshall up the normal defenses to the level that can protect you.

5. autoimmune disease means your body is marshalling up the normal defenses mistakenly and is actually attacking and trying to destroy itself.

6. If you are "allergic" to something-it could kill you if the autoimmune response is great enough (asthma and arthritis, fibromyalgia, severe peanut, shellfish, mushroom allergies are all allergic response maladies)

7. You don't show an allergic reaction the FIRST time you come in contact with a substance or disease. You get an allergic reaction --either the next time you come in contact or after you reach a saturation point--

8. The first time you come in contact with a substance either naturally (food products, pollen, disease) your body catalogs the 'markers' on a molecule of the foreign substance and tells your immune control center "the next time something that has a marker like this come in--attack it" This is why you don't get an allergic response the first time. The first time, the body is trying to find out if a substance is bad or good and how huge a response to make to fight it the next time it shows up--so it just waits--if the substance starts harming the body, then the body catalogs the antigens or markers and remembers it for the next time.

9 In the case of diseases, esp ones that make you really sick, the body launches a huge attack right away to fight the disease or what it thinks is a disease. It releases all kinds of cellular killers and chemicals that are supposed to overwhelm the enemy.


10. If the body is right and it is an enemy, then it attacks and kills immediately. When diseases kill a person, it is usually because the body is too weak to fight back, does not recognize the disease or accidentally attacks the wrong thing.

Vaccines work by introducing a foreign substance into the body in a weakened state or a killed state. The body reacts by cataloging the marker--then when the real disease comes, it is ready to attack right away and not wait.

[toldyouso29]

So vaccines basically are used to give a healthy body a 'heads up" so that it does not wait too long to attack a new disease. When viruses kill it is because the body either waited too long to mount a defence or did not realize that the substance was bad or was too weak to mount a defense and did not have enough of an army to do so. BUT...

and this is very important for those who rush to vaccinate to know--there is a down side. (I worked for companies who made vaccines) IF for some reason, a disease changes, the body will not recognize the new marker and it will wait and react just like it usually does when it does not have a catalog for that disease.

The other problem is--if for some reason the body overreacts. IN that case, when the disease comes, the body releases its army but the body goes hog wild attacking itself, or eating up its own cells --sort of like a berserker. IF this happens then the body can be killed not by the disease but by the macrophages and other necrotizing cells that are supposed to be the body's defenses. Many Scientists believe that in the 1918 flu, the flu somehow activated a hyper response and when it returned, instead of simply fighting the virus, the body began to attack its own lung tissue, bronchioles, etc and people literally drowned in the mucous and debris from their own cells being lysed (killed) if this is the case--then the vaccine would be the wrong thing to do. This would explain the true horror of the 1918 flu--it did not kill the old or the very young. The major group to die were the healthy 15 to 30 year olds. These people might have gotten the flu in the spring (a milder version came out in the spring of 1918) then when it came out again, all these young people got hit with their own bodies freaking out and killing them. Science does not know if this happened because no corpse would have retained the evidence of a hyperimmune response. But if it did, then giving the vaccine would hypersensitize you and leave people a sitting duck for when it struck again.

The idea is, that those who got the more virulent strain for the first time in 1918 survived, and those who were exposed in the spring then again in the fall died--NOT because the flu was more virulent, but because it released some chemical that confused the antibody response.

[toldyouso29]

The CDC must be trying to hype stuff for more funding. They should distance themselves from Sebelius's remarks that keeping kids out of school will not stop the spread of the flu--it would slow it most certainly--they should tell the truth and just admit that the economic slow down due to parents staying home instead of going to work due to no day care is what they are really concerned about--not the kids. Quarantine eventually isolates diseases. In every major epidemic it is eventually implemented with success.

The CDC should just shut up--90K dying of the flu is no different than the 130K or so who die of the flu every year--now is not the time for a new kind of yellow terrorism alert score in the form of virus alerts. We are not falling for it.

[MorganBarber44]

May this flu will pick up where it left off in 1918. All part of nature. Humanity gets too destructive, the Earth needs to heal itself with a thorough cleansing.

[HGOODGUY]

How about it takes your family first???

[erasmus111]

by TheMasses2002 August 27, 2009 12:23 PM EDT
I will just keep my hands away from my piehole, nose and ears and wash regularly.


Uh-huh, I'll bet. If everyone would do that little thing, that would be great. It would be a lot better to not have to get that vaccine, but people just do not wash their hands.