Global Pulse Blog

Reporting live from Manhattan…

We aren’t quite running down the streets with masks on our faces panicking yet (which, it’s not clear how good of an investment they are anyway; see Susan’s comment on masks on the previous flu post), but we did close four schools, as the number of confirmed cases in New York City rises to 51, the first US swine flu death is confirmed in a toddler in Texas, and the World Health Organization raises the pandemic alert level to Phase 5. The net worldwide case count is uncertain due to re-testing of previously identified cases in Mexico.

City health agencies are concerned about the effects of recent downsizing due to the recession on their ability to function at top form:

At a news conference on Monday, Dr. Richard E. Besser, the acting director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the public health system was in “a tough situation.”

“We hear about tens of thousands of state public health workers who are going to be losing their jobs because of state budgets,” he said. “It is very important that we look at that resource because this outbreak was identified because of a lot of work going on around preparedness.”

But according to John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza, now may be a reasonably good time to catch the bug.

For further reading while you’re holed up in your room ordering delivery and avoiding crowds:

• Link to the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene swine flu info page. Hospitals and clinics are working with the DOH to keep up surveillance and testing of possible cases, and precaution measures are being used for cases of influenza-like-illness.
• Link to the New York Times swine flu tracking map (this one nicely reports suspected cases as a separate category).
• The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, Penguin, 546pp — available here on Amazon, and a good read / horror story depending on your current P.O.V. and paranoia tendencies. It has a great chapter about the beginning of both microbiology and American medical education as we know them. This is the book that first got me interested in public health history.