WASHINGTON (Reuters) - H1N1 swine flu killed an estimated 3,900 Americans from April to October, U.S. health officials said on Thursday.
The starling thing about these deaths is 90% have been in people under the age of 65. This statistic is reverse what is normally seen for the seasonal flu.
In a normal flu season, 90% of deaths are in elderly people. Since September, 90% of deaths have been in people under age 65 -- with almost a quarter of the deaths in young people under age 25.
The government stopped counting swine flu (H1N1) cases in the US back in July when the number reached about 1 million. Swine flu has killed over 1000 people in the United States so far. The fog has lifted and President Obama sees an emergency.
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency and empowered his health secretary to suspend federal guidelines at hospitals and speed up how infected people might receive treatment in a disaster...
Administration officials said the declaration was a pre-emptive move designed to make decisions easier when they need to be made. Officials said this was not in response to any single development on an outbreak that has lasted months and has killed more than 1,000 people in the United States.
Adding to the crisis, there is a severe shortage of the H1N1 vaccine.
THURSDAY, Oct. 22 -- As reports of swine flu infections continue to pour in from across the United States, health experts labored Thursday to explain why delivery of stocks of the long-awaited H1N1 vaccine are falling behind schedule.
Federal officials had projected that 40 million doses would be on hand by Oct. 15, but not even 13 million doses had arrived by Tuesday.
Meanwhile, President Obama is giving 10% of our swine flu vaccine to the WHO for other countries.
Obama Donating 10 Percent of H1N1 Vaccines to Poor Countries
WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US government reported Monday more than 400 new cases of swine flu to take the nation's total number of infections above 5,000, and said it remained on guard for an autumn upsurge.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the number of confirmed and probable cases in 47 states plus Washington's District of Columbia now stood at 5,123, up from 4,714 on Friday.
A teacher at a New York school who had been in critical condition for days died Sunday after being infected with the A(H1N1) virus, taking the US death toll to six. Only Mexico has suffered more deaths from the disease.
The CDC has downgraded a travel warning for Mexico but Anne Schuchat, director of the agency's center for immunization and respiratory diseases, took issue with media reporting that is now playing down the outbreak.
"The H1N1 virus is not going away, despite what you may have heard," she told reporters, stressing that the number of confirmed cases in the United States may be only the "tip of the iceberg."
"Unfortunately based on the trends we're seeing, we do expect more illness, more hospitalizations, and more deaths," Schuchat said, with more than 200 people already requiring hospital treatment in the United States.
The CDC quit doing a separate state by state map two days ago. They are now throwing swine flu in with other flu statistics. This graph shows the explosion of swine flu in the last two weeks. Swine flu cases are the dark blue part of the stacked bar.
Swine flu is now being downplayed by the Obama administration and the Main Stream Media. However, according to the latest CDC numbers, Swine flu (H1N1) is rapidly spreading in the US. Over 2500 confirmed cased and three deaths have been recorded. According to the CDC.gov:
The ongoing outbreak of novel influenza A (H1N1) continues to expand in the United States. CDC expects that more cases, more hospitalizations and more deaths from this outbreak will occur over the coming days and weeks.
CDC continues to take aggressive action to respond to the expanding outbreak. CDC’s response goals are to reduce spread and illness severity, and provide information to help health care providers, public health officials and the public address the challenges posed by this emergency.
