H1N1 Ukraine death toll 940, India 1,098
Colorado Springs — While the United States and Britain share congratulations on surviving the pandemic of 2009, the rest of the world is roiling in an oven of pandemic flu that can in no way be described as mild, or imaginary.
People are dying. In Ukraine, the death toll is rising, and now stands at 940. With over 4 million people struggling with influenza, it is difficult to describe what is happening as exaggeration. Most affected Ukrainians do not feel that their plight is a hoax.
In India, the death toll is now 1,098, with over 4 million people suffering influenza and acute respiratory illness. To these people, the debilitating illness of influenza is not a joke. It is very real.
This war with influenza — the quickest spreading virus in the known history of mankind — is happening right now. Granted, it is on the other side of the world, which to many hardly seems real.
It is like people on a very long beach, pushed back and forth by a very long, slow wave. It has been one wave that in some places has not been very strong, while in others it has knocked people down, and in a few cases (many cases when viewing the entire long wave) people have been knocked down and drowned.
Now the wave has receded. People stand on the moist sand and talk to each other, it's all over, that wasn't so bad, they congratulate each other, how grossly exaggerated it all was, it was a hoax, no, maybe it never really happened, the people that died would have died anyway, most of it was just flu-like symptoms and not really part of the wave. Hype. Lies.
Meanwhile, the water is piling up, swelling into a huge and powerful hump behind the people, but it is just so far from us, all the way over there on the other side of the world, so how can it really matter?
How can it matter if it is in faraway places with exotic names such as Ukraine and India, and so what if the people there are falling desperately in the dragging undertow as they experience the crashing wave.
The wave is over there, right now. It is far from us. And for "over there," the numbers are not outrageous, really, they are manageable, is this not the prevailing sentiment?
While it is true, numbers such as 940 and 1,098 in death tolls are not the nightmare doomdsday scenarios predicted by some, but to all the people related to these "numbers," it is serious, because each number represents a human life, and each human life is connected to hundreds of other lives, and to these lives each individual number is a matter of life and death. It is indeed serious.
For the families of children that died in the United States, it does not seem much like a hoax. Nor to the people who have been hospitalized with this inconsequential influenza.
Have you ever been to the beach? When the wave goes out, it is not gone forever. The wave does not become a fantasy, a hoax, a dream, or even a nightmare that never returns. If you have ever been to the beach, you know. You understand.
The wave comes back.
Thus far the D225G and D225N acquisitions have been relatively rare. Recently released sequences had the first example of D225G in India as well as D225N in Japan. Similarly, the additional examples in Ukraine and Moldova which include both changes in the same samples significantly reduces the likelihood that these changes are due to independent random events which do not transmit, which is the current WHO working hypothesis. Instead the appearance of the same change on multiple backgrounds at the same time is more easily explained by recombination. The increasing detection of these changes raise concerns that an increased frequency will lead to increased frequencies of severe and fatal cases. - Recombinomics
