This seems like a pretty good system. By handling the bulk of inquiries online or over the phone, the British government is keeping swine flu sufferers where they belong: at home and in bed - which lowers the risk of contagion. Unless I've missed it, I haven't seen similar plans for the United States this fall:

More than 5,500 people received anti-viral drugs for swine flu on the first day of England's National Pandemic Flu Service, the government has said.

The telephone hotline and website were launched so patients could obtain treatment without a GP's prescription.

The system was "working well", Health Secretary Andy Burnham said.

Sufferers are advised to select a "flu friend" to pick up medicine for them. Critics say the system is open to abuse and should be staffed by experts.

And the Conservatives have argued the service should have begun earlier, when a global pandemic was declared, as it was now "too little, too late".

There are now 1,031 locations across England where the drugs can be collected, up from 330 on Thursday, when the service began.

People who think they have swine flu can complete a questionnaire online or over the telephone.

Among the symptoms listed are fever or temperature over 38C or 100.4F, coupled with two of the following: unusual tiredness, headache, runny nose, sore throat, shortness of breath or cough, loss of appetite, aching muscles, diarrhea or vomiting.

If patients are diagnosed with the virus, they are issued with a unique reference number which must be given when the drugs are collected.

However, patients are still being advised to contact GPs if they have serious underlying illnesses, are pregnant, have sick children aged under one, their condition suddenly worsens or continues to worsen after seven days - five for a child.

More than 100,000 people in the UK are estimated to have caught swine flu in the past week along, while 30 people have died after contracting the illness.

There was a huge rush to access the government website when it went online on Thursday, with reports of it receiving initially 2,600 hits a second, or 9.3m an hour.

More than 58,000 assessments were completed that day, 89% of them online.

If you've been following the news, you know that U.S. officials are much more worried about the second and third wave of swine flu, which should hit here sometime in the fall. And if that happens - since we have so many people unemployed and without health insurance - I predict we will have people dying here, too:

"In Mexico, we are very unaccustomed to going to the hospital. Here, if someone has a cold or anything else, they buy something in the pharmacy, or they leave it be," Flores said. "This is why Mexicans are dying. Because we are very indecisive about going to a hospital until it's too late."

Several theories have emerged as to why all but one of the confirmed deaths from swine flu have occurred in Mexico. Much of it is speculation -- that Mexico City's 7,300-foot elevation exacerbates respiratory illnesses, that there may be a slight variation between the viral strain prevalent in Mexico and swine flu elsewhere, that Mexico is further along in disease transmission and other countries will eventually see severe cases.

But a critical factor, according to specialists here, is that flu victims have delayed checking into hospitals until their condition has deteriorated so much they cannot be saved. While medicines are plentiful and cheap at Mexican pharmacies, swine flu antiviral medication was often not available or prohibitively expensive.

"Some patients arrive late at the hospitals, and to a certain degree this is a problem of education," José Sifuentes-Osorio, an infectious-disease specialist at the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition, said in a radio interview Monday. "Many of our people, independent of their socioeconomic situation, self-medicate for three or four days, and they lose precious time."

What is clear about the outbreak is that the epicenter is Mexico City, a megalopolis of more than 20 million people where about a third of the population lives in poverty. As of April 30, when there were 397 confirmed swine flu cases, 285 of those people lived in Mexico City, according to the most recent available statistics from the Health Ministry. Of the 26 people it said had died of the virus, 20 lived in the capital.

This would be a good time to re-introduce legislation requiring paid sick time for most employees:

Early this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that anyone with flu symptoms stay home from work or school.

President Obama reiterated that advice at his press conference on Wednesday night. “If you are sick, stay home,” he said. “If your child is sick, keep them out of school.”

“I know it sounds trivial,” the president said, after asking families to start taking other “very sensible precautions” like washing hands and covering up during coughs. “But it makes a huge difference.”

The president’s admonition to the sick to stay home didn’t sound trivial to Silvia Del Valle, a 42-year-old restaurant worker in Miami.

It sounded impossible.

When I spoke to her Thursday morning, Del Valle was sick in bed with a cough and a fever. Was she planning to go to work, I asked her, Obama’s press conference still fresh in my mind.

“Yes,” she said. “I need to go. Because if I don’t go, I lose my job.”

Del Valle’s not alone. Nearly half of all private sector workers in our country – more than 59 million people – have no paid sick time at all. The problem is particularly acute among women, low-wage workers – more than three-quarters of whom have no paid sick days – and part-timers.

DOWNLOADS: (2631)

PLAYS: (9674)

Embed

Keith Olbermann, on Countdown last night, brought the whammy down on the wingnut talking heads at Fox (and the rest of the conservative media as well) for their ongoing attempts to blame immigrants for the spread of the swine flu from Mexico:

Well, yes, you are a racist. Exactly how does that apply, though, to the people who the Centers for Disease Control confirmed actually carried the Swine Flu from Mexico to the U.S., a group of Catholic school students from New York City, who spent Spring Break in Cancun. Uncontrolled Catholic immigration, open borders for private school kids reckless?

Anyway, unswayed by the facts, the Republican echo chamber tried to stir the American melting pot with a classic recipe of hate and fear.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I thought that this line, though, was very ironic, this morning in one of the articles I read about surveillance at the Mexican border. You thought we had an immigration problem, well now we might actually want to prevent the sick people from crossing over the border.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Chaos in Mexico; from earthquakes to Swine Flu, will it mean more illegals heading for the U.S.

GLENN BECK, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Does anybody wish maybe we could control the border just a little bit at this point.

SHEPPARD SMITH, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Everybody is e-mailing, going the illegals are bringing it across the border. Relax.

SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Tonight, Swine Flu spreads from Mexico to the United States. Is this the latest border crisis.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The U.S. is not currently testing travelers from Mexico. But customs officials are wearing protective clothing.

MICHAEL SAVAGE, “THE SAVAGE NATION”: Illegal aliens are carriers of the new strain of Human Swine Avian Flu from Mexico. Is this a terrorist attack?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Some, though, say the solution is to close the border.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now talk that we should even close the border?

BECK: If this is so important, why haven‘t we closed the border.

NEAL BOORTZ, “THE NEAL BOORTZ SHOW”: There‘s the bio-terrorism angle. What better way to sneak a virus in this country than to give it to Mexicans.

This kind of talk -- directly associating the targets of a "drive them out" campaign with disease -- is classic eliminationist rhetoric. It's not surprising that it's bubbling up out of Fox News' fetid cauldron, either.

Tom Allison at Media Matters put together a first-round look at some of the ugliness:

-- Savage declaring that Mexicans "are a perfect mule -- perfect mules for bringing this virus into America."

-- Michelle Malkin warning that the pandemic was the product of "uncontrolled immigration."

-- Beck warning that the pandemic will create a crush of people trying to flee north across our border.

And that's just scratching the surface. As Eric Ward at Imagine 2050 observes, some of the nativist right's more inflammatory figures were saying even uglier things.

Writes Nezua at The Sanctuary:

The stances of those who most vocally oppose immigration today are so predictable that one could paint a face on a septic-tainted soccer ball and paste up word balloons and rest well, knowing that The Nativist Lobby point of view on any immigration-related topic will end in "deport them all" and "seal the borders" if not "round them up" and other tired ideas. And nobody reading now needs a reminder of how throughout time, both Latin America as well as all immigrants have been slurred and painted with the brush of disease by those resistant to changing demographics.

The NCLR's blog points out that this fearmongering has real life-and-death consequences:

It's unfortunate, then, that certain individuals with an obvious axe to grind are shamelessly exploiting a public health emergency for their own purposes. It's not surprising that some are implying that all immigrants are a threat to our health-that's standard fare on the hate group circuit.

Ironically, the very act of attempting to demonize and stigmatize entire groups, and even entire countries, is likely to impede these and other critical steps that the authorities are taking to protect all Americans from the spread of the flu, for example:

Continue reading »

Remember, kids, there is a middle ground between blind panic and a trip down the River Denial!

Cases of swine flu were confirmed early today in Israel and New Zealand, the first definitive proof that the dangerous new virus has spread to Asia.

The World Health Organization, which yesterday raised its pandemic threat level from 3 to 4, two levels below a full-scale pandemic, will not meet today to consider another increase, a spokesman said at a news conference.

While the agency said people should think carefully before traveling to or from areas known to be affected by the flu virus, spokesman Gregory Hartl said it considers formal travel restrictions and border closures ineffective because people who would be screened could be infected but not yet showing symptoms.

"Border controls don't work. Screening doesn't work," Hartl said, according to Reuters news service, describing the economically-damaging travel bans as basically pointless in public health terms.

He said "we are still at phase 4" in terms of threat level because officials do not yet "have incontrovertible evidence" that the virus spreads easily from human to human. Yesterday was the first time the international body had elevated its official estimation of the threat of an influenza pandemic up from level 3, using a system that was revised in the wake of the 2003 SARS outbreak.

"A pandemic is not considered inevitable at this time," said Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's assistant director general for health security and environment. "The situation is fluid, and the situation continues to evolve."

UPDATE: NYC health authorities say at least eight cases of flu in Queens are probably swine flu (they eliminated types A and B) and two cases were confirmed today in Kansas City.

This is very, very serious, and I'm glad Mexican authorities are treating it as such. One of the key factors in a pandemic flu (a global outbreak) is a mutated strain for which no one has immunity, and of course no one has developed a vaccine yet:

April 25 (Bloomberg) -- The World Health Organization is set to declare the deadly swine flu virus outbreak in Mexico and the U.S. a global concern, potentially prompting travel restrictions, said a person familiar with the matter.

An emergency committee of the WHO in Geneva will declare the outbreak “a public health event of international concern” in a 4 p.m. teleconference today, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting is confidential. In response, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan may raise the level of pandemic alert, which could lead to travel restrictions aimed at curbing the disease’s spread.

“These levels of pandemic alert are all signals for action,” said Malik Peiris, a professor of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong, who has studied influenza viruses for more than a decade. “Raising the level of alertness to influenza, especially in returning travelers, would be a relevant thing to do.”

Human-to-human spread of the previously unseen H1N1 swine influenza in Mexico and the U.S. is heightening concern that the virus may spark a pandemic. At least 68 people have died and more than 1,000 have fallen ill with flu-like symptoms in the Mexico City region in the past month, Jose Cordova, Mexico’s Health Minister, told reporters yesterday. The government has shut schools and distributed face masks.

Sari Setiogi, a WHO spokeswoman in Geneva, declined to comment on the agency’s response, saying it will depend on the outcome of today’s meeting.