Swine flu could infect half the U.S. population this fall and winter, hospitalizing up to 1.8 million people and causing as many as 90,000 deaths — more than double the number that occur in an average flu season, according to an estimate from a presidential panel released Monday.
That panel, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), released both a massive report assessing H1N1 preparations and recommendations.
Ezra Klein on our health care system:
We have a tendency to judge the health-care system primarily by its capacity to deliver extremely sophisticated and advanced care for traumatic injuries and catastrophic illnesses. The sort of stuff you see on “House,” say. But we think much less about its role as a public health infrastructure — its ability to deliver flu shots, and make sure that all of the country’s inhabitants have a trusted medical professional they can see if they’re sick.
On those measures, our system performs terribly. It’s simply too fractured to do anything different. Almost 50 million Americans have no insurance. Many more are underinsured. Many don’t have a particular doctor or even medical center where they feel comfortable receiving care. Many are uncertain about what is and isn’t covered in their health plan. Many have recently been uninsured, and so have no regular contact with the medical system and haven’t established an obvious way to begin having some.
The backstop to all this chaos is that you can go to an emergency room when things get really bad. That’s fine for a car accident. It’s not good for preventing the spread of the flu. You don’t go to the emergency room when you’re a bit sick. You go when you’ve become really ill. Which not only increases the likelihood that you wait until you get really sick, but with the flu, that you infect many others along the way. That in turn gives the flu more opportunities to mutate into something much worse.
[Lat week] Google announced that the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit organization focused on providing free access to scientific and medical literature, will use Knol to give scientists a place to collaborate and share research on important topics, including influenza research.
PLoS Currents, as this project is called, will first focus on influenza research and might later expand to other topics. In order to keep the standard of the submissions high, PLoS will be able to use a number of new moderation tools in Knol to vet submissions and comments. Any submission that is accepted for publication will immediately appear on PLoS Currents and will also be publicly archived at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows anybody to share and remix these papers (with attribution).
For much more on that, Introducing PLoS Currents: Influenza