gosmom

SUPPOSEDLY....a mens dorm in north quad.....but with such a close, confined campus, not sure it really matters which dorm....I suspect ill student went to class, dining halls, etc., so contact with virus could happen in many locations....
Appears ND taking very seriously and keeping students informed....

SouthJerseyChessMom

^^^I just hope the dormmates were contacted ASAP, to be on extra alert to symptoms.
The benefit of Tamiflu is when it is taken within hours of onset. Very important for students to seek medical attention as soon as symptoms appear.

SouthJerseyChessMom

Ok, I just read the Observer article ,and am NOT happy that they HAVE NOT notified the dormmates. This is completely irresponsible. (FYI-my S lives off campus, but if he was in a dorm I would be calling the rector this morning)
I listened to NPR description about how virulent the virus spread through the Queens High School Within hours , by 9:00 AM lines of VERY sick previously healthy teens.
Getting the antiviral medicines EARLY is critical.

And, this is why I am so concerned about ND's casual approach.
Copied from another thread.
Posted by IDmom
Actually, even though the number of deaths seem few in Mexico, the rate is pretty significant.

Mexico is also reporting 'serious pneumonia' which I intepret to possibly mean viral pneumonia. I've read more than I want to know about ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome).... and the significance of the occurrence of viral pneumonia that results from the influenza virus actually entering the lungs rather than the normal bacterial pneumonia that crops up as a secondary bacterial infection to the influenza virus which has not entered the lungs. As I understand it, ARDS is essentially a 'burning' of the lungs which occurs from viral pneumonia and which is like that experienced by serious smoke inhalation victims or drowning victims. It has a high mortality rate. It also explains the death rate from influenza among healthy young adults. The 'burning' is a result of a huge immune system response by the body to the virus in the lungs. The body wages war on the virus IN the lungs which causes the damage. The age group with the strongest response mechanism is young adults...and the stronger the response, the more devastating the damage.

It seems we do not have the more severe viral pneumonia/ARDS here in the States...but I would like to know what is occurring in Mexico. (Btw..the virus seems to have jumped species in Vera Cruz on the Gulf Coast...there is word that a census taker may have also contributed to the spread there.)

The reason I am concerned is because these viruses go through 'passage' where they become either more or less virulent. As I mentioned in a previous post, the 1918 Pandemic had three waves...the first being very mild and the 2nd which occurred months later, very lethal. I would hope that we could come up with some sort of vaccine between waves.

SouthJerseyChessMom

University of Delaware reports suspected infection. They are having news conference at 11 about it.

8:38 p.m., April 28, 2009----Four University of Delaware students have been identified with cases of influenza that meet probable definitions for swine flu, Dr. Paul Silverman, Associate Deputy Director for Health Information & Science of the Division of Public Health announced Tuesday evening.

The State Division of Public Health is submitting samples from these four cases to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to determine if they are cases of swine flu.

Sportfire

Please take it down a notch.

Every campus deals with sick kids at the end of every semester because of cramming, close quarters, etc...

Healthy young adults really aren't at risk for anything more than getting sick for a few days which happens every semester during exams.

SouthJerseyChessMom

^^^^ nope not taking it down a notch.
Sportsfire, I heard the NPR interview with the nurse at the Queens prep school, who quickly knew she had a problem at her school. As a former NY Heath Dept worker she knew who to call, within hours.

A baby has died in Texas. The young healthy college age student's own immune system can cause a deadly response to fighting this strain, thereby causing death.

From NYTIMES Article today describing how virulent this is;
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/ny...l?ref=nyregion

By 10 a.m., dozens of students were pouring into the hallway outside her office, sitting miserably on the floor, nauseous and confused.

“Wow, we have something going on here,” she recalled thinking in an interview on Tuesday.

“I don’t feel like I’m a hero,” said Ms. Pappas, who had not been identified on Sunday when the city revealed her role in spurring its investigation. “But I feel like I have very good instincts, based on my experience, and that’s why I’m here. I think school nurses should be at all schools. You’re like the hub, if something doesn’t go right.”

Among her previous experiences was a whooping-cough outbreak, which forced the postponement of a few football games, but nothing else of the magnitude she was seeing.

By about 10:30 Thursday morning, she said, she had gone to the principal’s office and called Dr. Gary Krigsman, a supervising doctor in the bureau of school health, on his cellphone to tell him that students were dropping sick, many with fevers of 101.5 and 102 degrees. (Her son, a junior at the school, also came down with a mild fever.)

Dr. Krigsman connected her to Ada Santiago, a nurse who works closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

“Then I felt better and went back to my office, where it was pretty chaotic,” Ms. Pappas recalled. Her two assistants, her mother, Agnes, and Kathy Carroll, were so busy that they had been joined by secretaries, assistant principals and even school security officers. Everyone was taking temperatures, triaging cases and using cellphones to call parents to come and take their children home.

Students sat on the floor, miserable and confused, as school employees scrambled to find enough chairs. Ms. Pappas sent 102 students home on Thursday and another 80 on Friday, even though a small number of those, she noted, were suffering from allergies and injuries rather than flu symptoms.

notre dame AL

Interestingly, we had heard that it was a female student. So, I guess you just don't know w/regards to info at this point-we are advising our own student to keep washing hands and drink plenty of gatorade. We know it won't prevent, but being that it is so close to the end of the semester with finals and all, I guess it will be a day by day issue. If more students become ill, I feel certain there will be more updates. We did read that student was in isolation at Student Health after diagnosis. Of course, that does not make up for the period of contagiousness beforehand. I feel quite certain that ND is monitoring this situation very carefully and esp since CDC is involved. We hope that the school can get thru finals and perhaps students will be leaving campus as soon as possible when finished with exams. I wonder if Pres. Obama will change his mind about speaking at graduation (esp if more cases surface on campus)?!?

SouthJerseyChessMom

notredameal- check out the video on the local TV news of flu report.
Did I hear it right- the student resumed her normal activities until it was confirmed and since they asked her to stay in the dorm?
Confined to dorm?

I may have misunderstood
segment is on home page ---on right
WNDU - Home Your Severe Weather Station, South Bend, Indiana News, Weather, Sports, Notre Dame News, StormTeam 16

Irishcali

Not good news! I told my daughter "the usual...wash the hands and keep them out of your mouth!" She isn't too concerned (typical!) but of course I'm sure if any symptoms arise, she will head to St. Liam's. I'm worried, but what more can you do? Bad timing though...

jonoam

WNDU is reporting that a student HAS the swine flu. However, the student has already recovered from it--all it took was so ibuprofen and some decongestant according to WNDU as well. Sounds like the patient got better quicker than students with regular colds. So why all the hype? As long as it's treated soon enough--and I'm fully confident in ND's ability to do so...we're fine.

gravitysrainbow

I honestly don't understand the hype around swine flu. Regular strains of the flu kill thousand of individuals each year, and so far most of the deaths from swine flu have occurred in Mexico (where healthcare is no better than a 3rd world country).

I think this is just a case of the media taking a story and running with it.

SouthJerseyChessMom

WHO flu chief Dr. Keiji told reporters that developments in the disease were moving the agency closer to pushing its pandemic alert level up a notch to phase 5 — indicating widespread human-to-human transmission and an "imminent" pandemic. Phase 6, the highest in the scale, is for a full-scale pandemic.

SouthJerseyChessMom

Gravity----more
***uda said it was too soon to know how severe a pandemic might be.

"We just don't know what the future is going to hold," he said, noting that the 1918 pandemic started mild in the spring, was quiet during the summer, but then exploded into a much more severe form by autumn. In the end, the so-called Spanish flu infected as many as one-third of the world's population and killed about 40 million people.

WHO, which only adds to its case tally when it receives notification from countries, said there were 114 confirmed cases in seven countries, but reports were still coming in. The agency was rushing to organize its third emergency meeting in a week — perhaps as early as Wednesday night or Thursday morning.

In the United States, Dr. Richard Besser, the acting chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said 91 cases have now been confirmed in 10 states, and health officials there reported Wednesday that a 23-month-old Mexican boy had died in Texas from the disease.

Across Europe, Germany confirmed three swine flu cases and Austria one, while the number of confirmed cases rose to five in Britain and 10 in Spain.

Germany's national disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, said the country's three cases include a 22-year-old woman hospitalized in Hamburg, a man in his late 30s at a hospital in Regensburg, north of Munich, and a 37-year-old woman from another Bavarian town. All three had recently returned from Mexico.

hawkswim09

as usual with many schools, organizations, etc, I am sure that ND just does not want to start chaos on campus, and are dealing with the problem to the best of their ability.

additionally, a school with such talented students, faculty and staff, probably would not send the sick individual back to his/her dorm.

gravitysrainbow

A disease being considered a pandemic does not indicate the severity of said disease, it just indicates its infection rate. If everyone in the US and UK woke up tomorrow and had a mild cold, that would be a pandemic. But that doesn't make the disease more fatal.

And it's pretty dubious to analogize this outbreak to the 1918 pandemic, considering the quality/quantity of medical care in 1918 is absolutely nothing like 2009.