Friday, May 01, 2009
A global pandemic is all but inevitable, because U.S. health officials are not willing to implement the types of social distancing that would likley block the spread of the flu virus in the U.S. Beside the non-life-threatening symptoms exhibited by most of the afflicted, officials reason that even if, for example, all U.S. schools were closed and its borders sealed, other countries would have to follow suit to prevent a global pandemic. Thus the swine flu will likely go pandemic sometime next week. R.C.J.
Swine flu may have been caught early enough to prevent a serious U.S. epidemic, according to computer models developed by Virginia Tech's Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL). Separately, CombiMatrix Corp. announced the availability of a flu chip manufactured for it by STMicroelectronics that it claimed can confirm swine flu infections in four hours. NDSSL, part of Virginia Tech's Bioinformatics Institute, (Blacksburg, Va.), boasts the world's most power epidemic modeling tool. It is used by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which has designated swine flu as the "2009 H1N1 flu virus."
Posted by R. Colin Johnson at 6:38 AM