Only 10% of children will have symptoms with Swine Flu - research

[morningpaper]

Very interesting

"The Health Protection Agency has reviewed blood tests which showed higher levels of infection among children than originally thought.

In hotspot areas, such as London and the West Midlands, a third of school-aged children may have had the virus, but only one in 10 or less got ill."

If private clinics would screen individual children for a fee, then I'm sure lots of parents would take it up to save them the anguish of deciding whether to immunise or not.

that the HPA are doing blood tests for research? Doesn't mean reliable blood tests are commercially available, though.

Ah yes I see what you mean

bugger.

I have a humanities degree, btw, so you may prefer to wait for someone with BSc or MSc or MBBS or MD or something after their name to come along.

But spend my life writing about healthcare so am fairly confident I've grasped this one, as far as it goes.

wouldn't put my child through a blood test unnecessarily tbh

they aren't very pleasant (esp if child is young and not particularly co-operative)

yes but if I had a blood test and it came back positive there is a very strong likelihood that my children were exposed to SF too......[the gp thought we'd had it anyway but nice to have it confirmed]

I don't know Po. Right at the start, when they were testing people they thought had it, we had friends who got it but no-one else in their family did.

Is all a bit odd. Don't know how they would differentiate between SF and all the bugs going round at the moment. There's a particularly hideous chesty bug doing the rounds in London now that may well be swine flu but guess they could never tell other than testing.

We think dh had it back in the summer (although they'd stopped swabbing so impossible to say which strain of flu it was) but ds and I didn't succumb. Which I thought was very odd given that however careful the flu sufferer is, being in the same house as someone coughing and sneezing is usually a guarantee of getting it yourself.

I had very serious flu as a child, in that epidemic in the late 70s - think it was called Asian flu at the time. Am hoping that has left me with some immunity to all strains of flu, although that may not be scientifically justified. I've certainly never been as ill as that with flu ever again.

It is odd that a family would not catch SF if a family member has it. We've always been ill at the same time, so I'm confident if I had been exposed so would dcs [remember this thread topic is many more children than thought get it without symptoms]

It's all very odd, isn't it? On the one hand we are being urged to vaccinate our children, and on the other we are being told that 90% of infections will not result in illness, that the number of deaths has been far fewer than from seasonal flu, and that in any case a third of children in densely populated areas will have already had it.

What is going on?

Also Zeph the american press is stating up to a third of SF cases occur without fever, over here unless you have fever you are not diagnosed with SF. The confusion is astonishing.

Yes it is REALLY confusing

DH and DD have both had periods of one or two nights of fevers/delirium so I am left wondering

I don't think I can blame my nights of delirium on swine flu.

Oh yes - I noticed that when we were ill here a few months ago and was trying to work out whether it was swine flu. The NHS website had fever as the defining symptom but the North American health sites said something quite different.

There have been a lot of murmurs over the past few years that a really serious viral pandemic is inevitable at some point. It may be that the response to swine flu is a sort of trial run - ie it has been treated as though it were a really serious strain in order to test the system in advance of, say, an Avian Flu pandemic. God help us if Avian Flu does take hold and the response is as shambolic as this though.

Surely this will further reduce the number of children have the vaccine

I was rather astonished at this news!

In the states the cdc estimate that 540 pediatric deaths have occurred so far from this flu, that's around 5 times higher than the average number of pediatric deaths each year from seasonal flu. So I just don't see how this tallies in at all.

Unbelievably shambolic. But hopefully lessons may have be learned [yeah right]

It seems with SF some people are very frightened of it, quite a lot of people think it is a fuss about nothing, and all the press seems to waver between the two.

Actually early on, before the proper flu helpline and website, the NHS list of symptoms also did not have fever as essential. It became an essential symptom only when the proper flu website started. So I wonder if the difference is that now we're routinely prescribing Tamiflu via that - so a fever is considered essential for having Tamiflu even though they know that plenty of people without fever may still have swine flu.

I think we've been very lucky with this - if the mortality rate had consistently been what it looked like it was early on in Mexico then we would all be terrified - and nobody could possibly have known back then that it would be looking this mild in November (and to be fair we don't know what it will look like next summer) - we've just been lucky so far (and the NHS etc. have had a dry run which will be bound to have been useful in the long run).

We're all guinea pigs for the whole thing including the vaccines - it's an emergent situation so we're all gambling without knowing for sure what they outcomes will be. If they do find unexpected extra side effects for the vaccines that also will be useful for the future. We can't avoid it now though because at the time of starting vaccination we still don't know how it will go over the next few months, or how to stop some people getting severely ill.

Yes that makes perfect sense about fever and Tamiflu and the NHS website.

there's a flu like bug spreading like wildfire round the dc's school here too (east midlands), ds has it and is off school again today, he's had a temp/fever, although that has settled down now but has been complaining his body aches, bad cough, nose running etc and is very tired, slept most of yesterday. there are a bunch off school in year 2 with suspected swine flu. does make you wonder if they haven't all actually got the same thing, with the ones who have been to see the doctor being labeled as suspected swine flu.

i haven't taken ds to the docs, he is ill, but is coping with it. whether it is swine flu or not is anyone's guess since they're not swabbing. how accurate are the swine flu statistics? dh lectures at uni, and oddly enough, as he put it, all the skivers 'usual suspects' have had swine flu. actually, some of his students seem to have had it at least 3 times

sounds like SF lucykate [fever/body aches/cough/respiratory symptoms]

really?!, he is ill, there's not doubt about that, but i kind of expected swine flu to be worse than this. what's the bets i get it now, and get a taste of my own medicine

well dcs had high temp, ds only for one day, sore throats and the runs, and gp diagnosed SF, she said she was pretty certain. But they had no cough, so I was sceptical. I on the other hand have been coughing for England for weeks. I would say your dcs symptoms sound very standard for SF [not a doctor though]