Carter's+Page

== = = =Swine Flu and its Health Care Policy Implications=
 * = =[[image:swine.jpg width="93" height="129" align="right"]]=
 * = =[[image:swine.jpg width="93" height="129" align="right"]]=

||
 * = ==== The recent outbreak of the H1N1 strain of the flu virus, more commonly known as swine flu, has been all over the news media and has such has stirred up questions about the state of the U.S. health care state and has caused general panic and paranoia. Are people hyped up about the possibility of a pandemic on there own, or is mainstream media responsible? Who plays more of a role in relating this outbreak to health care in the U.S. and how it must be changed? ====

||

=Mainstream Media Coverage= - ||

-

[|Retailers Nationwide Cash In on Swine Flu Fears (Fox)]
The Better Business Bureau said that already 2 percent of all spam is about [|swine flu] and offers for protecting yourself from it. "People are frightened, they will look wherever they can to do whatever they can to hedge their bets to prevent catching [|swine] flu or prevent spreading it," Howard Scwartz from the Better Business Bureau told WTNH in New Haven. For the tech savvy, IntuApps is currently waiting for Apple to approve their Swine [|Flu] Tracker for iPhones. The application includes a map showing confirmed and suspected cases, the current threat level for the swine flu, a symptoms area and a page dedicated to breaking news on the topic, TechCrunch reported. Graphic designers and online retailers are offering swinophobes everywhere the chance to make a fashion statement — even as they ward off the deadly bug. It's been barely a week since the [|H1N1 virus] seized hold of America's attention and immune systems, and the sartorial scrubs are already flying off the shelves. Nuvo Accessories, an online retailer that is making animal-print and bandanna-style flu masks, said it's preparing to ship about 2,500 units it's sold in the past five days. Orders started "coming from all over the place once we put up the Web site" at flufashion.net, said Jay Ginsberg, sales manager for Nuvo. "It's all over the world." Ginsberg said his clients see the danger of the virus and are ordering his masks out of a necessity. "They don't think it's a joke," he said. Even unadorned masks are selling. On Amazon.com, swine flu masks are currently the No. 4 seller in women's apparel, beating out another strapped accessory: the bra. Other products promise to keep frightened people "safe" from the virus. Companies advertizing flu-related items such as hand sanitizers, vitamins and even thermometers are trying to cash in on the flu frenzy as well. In response, pharmacies and other retailers nationwide are stocking up on swine flu products in anticipation for a heightened demand.
 * Retailers, marketers and online scammers are finding a way to cash in on the swine flu craze with fashionable surgical masks, iPhone flu tracking applications, test kits and even bogus survival kits and vaccines.**
 * Panic in 2005 and 2006 over [|bird flu], “billed as an impending human pandemic that would wipe out a large proportion of the Earth’s population.” Yet in the end, this [|flu] virus has killed fewer than 300 people worldwide, most of whom were in direct contact with infected birds.
 * 'Perhaps public health messages would have a greater effect if they truly scared people, Mr. Briscoe said, noting that millions of people continue to smoke even though it will contribute to the deaths of half of them.'
 * 'The level of risk we consider acceptable seems to be directly related to whether it’s a risk we can choose ourselves .'



[|Best swine flu strategy: Stay away, everyone (MSNBC)]
Slowing the spread of a swine flu epidemic in the United States could well depend on how quickly communities can empty schools, close day care centers and shut down public gathering spots — and on whether ordinary people are willing to stay away from their neighbors. Even though cases in the U.S. remain isolated, experts in so-called “social distancing” strategies say such measures could reduce an outbreak of potentially deadly infections by at least half, but only if steps are taken early. “As soon as they have one or more cases, that threshold is crossed,” said Ira Longini, a national flu expert and professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “You have to cut contact with people by 50 percent.” By that measure, closing certain schools in New York and Texas after students came down with the virus last week was a smart move. And so was limiting exposure of additional victims confirmed in three other states. So far, the U.S. total stands at 68. But far more wide-ranging steps affecting entire communities could become necessary if isolated clusters of infection in the U.S. expand to resemble the widespread outbreak that has sickened 26 in Mexico, where 6,000 are showing symptoms and 20 of 152 deaths have been tied to the virus. ‘We're going to have a problem’ “If it causes person-to-person transmission in the community in a virulent form, we’re going to have a problem,” said Dr. Brian Currie, an infectious disease expert at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. In that scenario, public health officials would be called upon to enact voluntary plans that could keep people away from work, out of school and in their homes for as long as it takes to quell the threat of infection. Businesses would be advised to let workers telecommute, Longini said. Sports teams would be encouraged to cancel practices and games and parents would be urged to keep small children at home, avoiding even playgroups and parks. n some cases, people could be advised to stay 6 feet away from others in public, said Longini, who has built elaborate computer models that demonstrate how infection slows when such plans are implemented. In severe situations, people may be told to stay 3 feet apart to avoid the infectious spray of droplets when someone coughs or sneezes, Currie said. He was part of three teams of researchers commissioned by the federal government to study intervention strategies and published the results last year. “The least stringent scenarios cut the epidemic by half,” he said. “The most stringent cut it by two-thirds.” Longini's models figured a compliance rate of about 60 percent, which allows some latitude for human nature. "It depends on how afraid they are,” Currie noted. Health officials in every state have submitted plans to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that rely on some form of social distancing to combat infection, alone or in combination with antiviral drugs for those who are already sick. In extreme situations, local health officials would have the authority to quarantine households. The measures are intended to slow spread of disease during the several months it could take to manufacture and distribute a vaccine effective against the new strain of the H1N1 swine flu — or any other new virus. In 1918 pandemic, social distancing worked Evidence that social distancing cuts infection comes directly from the worst flu outbreak in memory, the 1918 pandemic. Cities that closed schools, churches and theaters during the early months of that deadly plague had peak weekly death rates about 50 percent lower than those of cities that imposed such measures later or not at all, according to a 2007 paper led by Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. In Mexico this week, government officials emptied museums, closed schools, canceled sports events and advised churches to not hold services. They also urged members of the close-knit society to avoid customary social greetings, such as kisses on the cheeks. So far, the relatively few swine flu cases in the U.S. have not warranted widespread calls for social distancing. But that could change dramatically said Longini, who said that if his concern were measured on a scale of one to 10, this outbreak would be a six or a seven. He urged health officials and the general public to remain aware of non-medical strategies that could help quell the spread of this new virus. “I’m extremely worried,” said Longini. “We still have an opportunity to stop this, but it’s rapidly disappearing.” - ||
 * The [|World Health Organization] announced Friday that it would rewrite its rules for alerting the world to new diseases, meaning the [|swine flu] circling the globe will probably never be declared a full-fledged pandemic
 * Alert level to 4 and then 5 as the virus spread in North America
 * There is little flu surveillance of pigs in much of the world, and even in the United States it is “not very systematic,”
 * The [|new virus has been confirmed in 42 countries] and had killed 86 people. About half of those hospitalized are young and healthy with no underlying conditions ||
 * = =Citizen Media Coverage=

-[|On Second Thought, Don't Panic (Hotair)]
With [|Joe Biden keeping his family off of public transportation] and [|Barack Obama giving prime-time hygiene lessons], one might be forgiven for climbing into a bunker while waiting for the first third of Stephen King’s The Stand// to unfold. Instead, people can stand down from panic mode. Scientists have begun concluding that the latest strain of the swine flu, or H1N1 for those too sensitive to pork, may in fact be [|//less// dangerous than normal flu strains] we see every year:

As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza — at least in its current form — isn’t shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics. In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare. “Let’s not lose track of the fact that the normal seasonal influenza is a huge public health problem that kills tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands around the world,” said Dr. Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine in Madison.

That’s exactly [|what I wrote yesterday]. Apart from Mexico, WHO scientists haven’t seen excess mortality in infected people. They’re beginning to suspect that a complicating condition exists there, either poorer medical response or another environmental component that creates more fatalities. It’s still too early to dismiss the danger out of hand, and the lack of a specific vaccine for this strain makes response slower than anyone would like. However, the amount of panic over the handful of cases worldwide seems all out of proportion, and perhaps nowhere more so than at the White House itself. Clearly, they wanted a chance to show that they could handle a crisis, and either purposefully or accidentally blew this one into a crisis so severe that Americans had to be warned away from public transport. The flu causes far too many deaths in the US and around the world, and those at higher risk need to take precautions against exposure. Let’s keep the overall danger in perspective, though.
 * “It appears at this point in schools in New York City in these days to be spreading more rapidly than traditional influenza,”
 * Occupancy at the pediatric emergency room of Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, for example, was up 35 percent, with parents bringing their children in at the slightest sign of illness, though no swine flu had been confirmed there, said Dario Centorcelli, a hospital spokesman.
 * But he said that in a normal flu season, 30 to 40 percent of children and young adults from the ages of 5 to 15 or 20 typically are infected with flu. “So this may merely be an exaggeration of that background experience that we’ve had.”

[|Snoutbreak '09 (Huffington Post)]
As the media coverage of swine flu reaches a fevered pitch, Jon Stewart wants you to know that at 149 deaths in Mexico, it still ranks last on the "list of things that can kill you in Mexico." In the first video below, Stewart took on the 24-hour news networks, mocking their sensationalist graphics, writing, and questions as intentionally terrifying. He compiled clips of reporters and anchors saying that the whole world could perish, that this could be an act of bioterrorism, etc. and then showed clips of them saying "we don't want to freak anybody out." Really? In the second video below, John Oliver reports from the CDC and Jason Jones reports things he heard from some guy. The latter begins to believe Oliver's soothing words are just a cover-up for him being a British swine-flu zombie and urges fans to shoot him in the head. Poor John Oliver. This video is giving me trouble, instead of embedding it, I will post the link: [|Snoutbreak '09]

The swine flu, in many ways, was the perfect storm in the realm of media coverage. Due to the general lack of knowledge the public had of this mysterious illness and the disease scares of recent years including the anthrax and bird flu scares, media coverage, both mainstream and citizen, take particular trends that help define the differences between the two sources. While all four of the examples that I chose are very different in their style and coverage, they portray consistent trends about media coverage. Swine flu is also a prime topic for media analysis as it tends to be bipartisan issue, with republicans and democrats on both side of the issue.
 * ~ -Comparative Analysis ||
 * ~ -Comparative Analysis ||

The first trend that I noticed was that mainstream media has a tendency to move stories to the extreme, while citizen media more often keeps things in perspective in relative comparison. "It is a judgment call," one WHO official said when asked about whether the global alert needs to hit its top rung. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan raised it to level 5 -- signaling a pandemic was "imminent" -- last week after the flu strain that killed young adults in Mexico emerged in the United States and Canada and spread from schools to communities there. Under the rules, just one country outside the Americas needs to have a community-level outbreak of the new strain to trigger a Phase 6 designation indicating a global pandemic is under way. Pork producers in the United States and Mexico could see a drop in sales, but there is no evidence that any of the flu cases stemmed from contact with pigs. Prices for hogs fell on Friday to a two-month low in the United States. Mexico is the No. 2 market for U.S. pork, valued at $691.28 million. Russia said it had imposed curbs on meat imports from Mexico and the United Arab Emirates said it was considering banning imports of all pork products from Mexico and the United States.

The second trend that was quite noticeable between mainstream and citizen media is that mainstream media is often more of a presentation, with access to new materials, but often lacking an analysis whereas citizen media is very conversational, turning over old information with new interpretation, but what some would say to be a lack of ‘original content’. "Level 6 does not mean, in any way, that we are facing the end of the world," she told the Spanish daily El Pais this week. She stressed that the alert ladder indicates how likely the virus is to spread around the world, not how dangerous it is. The WHO's recommendations about how to respond to a pandemic are virtually the same for alert levels 5 and 6.In both cases, countries with outbreaks are told to consider closing schools and cancelling public events, and to distribute drugs and procure vaccines as means allow, while "countries not yet affected" are urged to prepare themselves for the virus. Some drug makers may benefit. Roche Holding AG's and Gilead Sciences Inc.'s Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline Plc's and Biota's Relenza are both recommended drugs for seasonal flu and have been shown to work against the new disease. Tamiflu is expected to be in greatest demand in a pandemic as it is a pill. Relenza must be inhaled.

- - ||