Estimates of severity of H1N1 swine flu have been hard to calculate due to the difficulties of counting and testing large numbers of people with symptoms. These estimates help health officials plan for and project outcomes and interventions to treat symptoms. Now research reports that H1N1 flu will most likely be less severe than predicted.
The study, published in PLoS Medicine, investigated the severity of the pandemic's impact in the U.S. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the UK Medical Research Council analyzed surveillance data from the CDC, New York and Milwaukee during April through July 2009. They used the Bayesian statistical analysis to estimate the proportion of H1N1 patients requiring hospitalization and intensive care admission or patient deaths.
Health officials originally estimated a case/fatality ratio of 0.1% (one death for every 1000 infections). Now using current data, the researchers estimate a case/fatality ratio of 0.048%. Other calculation methods estimated it to be seven to nine times lower.
"These estimates suggest that an autumn-winter pandemic wave of pH1N1 with comparable severity per case could lead to a number of deaths in the range from considerably below that associated with seasonal influenza to slightly higher, but with the greatest impact in children aged 0-4 and adults 18-64," the study authors write. "These estimates of impact depend on assumptions about total incidence of infection and would be larger if incidence of symptomatic infection were higher or shifted toward adults, if viral virulence increased, or if suboptimal treatment resulted from stress on the health care system; numbers would decrease if the total proportion of the population symptomatically infected were lower than assumed."
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Prevention helps reduce the risk of colds and flu infection. Some preventive ways include frequent hand washing, maintaining a balanced diet, drinking adequate fluids, getting plenty of sleep and avoiding people who are ill. Supplementing with natural nutrients can also help prevent infections.
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