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Jason Gale of Bloomberg News today takes a fascinating look at the mystery over how some small percentage of young and previously healthy H1N1 flu victims can experience severe, life threatening symptoms while the majority get by with mild or moderate illness.
Is it genetics? Or is it simply taking a deep breath at the wrong time?
This article is well worth reading in its entirety.
Swine Flu Mystery in Healthy Young Spurs Search for a Cause
By Jason Gale
Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- After being infected with swine flu, Brent Robb, a 34-year-old New Zealander with no pre- existing medical conditions, spent 11 days in a coma induced by doctors in a last-ditch effort to save his life.
A printer who liked to bike 12 miles a week for exercise, Robb lost two months of work while sick, and a sixth of his body weight. He survives as an example of a mystery hovering over the fast-moving pandemic that has spread to 177 countries in four months, yet causes little more than a fever and a cough in all but a select few.
Seasonal flu kills predominantly the frail elderly. Researchers are trying to determine why the H1N1 swine flu virus, much like the Spanish Flu of 1918, is lethal to a portion of young people in good health. The reason may involve a person’s genetics, or simply taking a deep breath just as a nearby infected person sneezes.
“That’s a question we have to find the answer to,” said Nikki Shindo, a Geneva-based doctor who has led the World Health Organization’s investigation of swine flu patients since the virus was discovered in Mexico in April.
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