This marks our last post here at the H1N1 (Swine Flu) Update blog. While our blogspot home here has served us well, and we are a little melancholy to say goodbye to it, the feeling is eclipsed by our excitement at posting to our new WordPress digs.
This will be more than just a domain-name change. Over the last 12 years, the staff here has provided thousands of lay-rescuers and healthcare professionals with life-saving, cardiac support training and equipment. We’ve mounted preparations and responses to everything from floods and wildfires to plane crashes and suspected terrorist attacks. In the new blog, we will more completely explore the issues and events that surround everything that happens here at Global Medical Services and Global Consulting – including pandemic H1N1 planning and response.
Rather than just distil useful and relevant news and updates from the media noise for you, we plan on explaining why we think these things merit your attention. We’ll take a look at how people are responding to current incidents, and talk about how we can all do better next time. And we can always do better. The entire staff is looking forward journeying down the road ahead.
We hope you are too.
Read further updates at http://theglobalguard.wordpress.com/
International News
H1N1 appears less contagious than past pandemics
A pair of studies release by Cambridge University suggests the H1N1 virus does not transmit well via secondary infection. One study examined boys who fell ill with the pandemic flu at summer camp in Florida. Among the 212 boys at the camp, the virus’ successful attack rate was 23%. Once they got home the infected boys had contact with 87 more people, but the attack rate fell to 3.5%. Researchers suspect the reason for the drop is the return home after peak infectiousness had passed the advance warning households received when the sick campers returned. The second study found that 13% of 511 students at a Hong Kong secondary school contracted H1N1, but only 5.9% of the people in the infected students’ households got sick. These findings support a December 2009 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that further noted secondary infection rates for the 1957 and 1968 pandemics were as high as 40%. University of Minnesota CIDRAP
Two members step down from the WHO’s pandemic review panel
To answer critics of the World Health Organization, the UN agency convened an independent panel of experts last month to begin reviewing and discussing the WHO’s pandemic response. The identities of the panels members has been kept secret to insulate them from outside influence, but two of the panel’s experts resigned this week. John MacKenzie and Dr. Tony Evans were involved in planning the WHO’s pandemic response and felt serving on the review committee could become a conflict of interest. Chair of the panel Dr. Harvey Fineberg said, "They each concluded it would be better to avoid the position as reviewer of their own earlier actions." The WHO Director General Margaret Chan has promised to make the names of the remaining committee members public once the review is complete and the pandemic is over. CBC News
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