What Percentage of People Die that Get the Swine Flu?
May 1, 2009 | In: Health
Swine Flu Deaths
On to the morbid question on the topic – How many people die from the swine flu?
Getting swine flu is not an immediate death sentence. A healthy adult can weather it out as a typical flu – bed rest, lots of fluids, and healthy eating. The dangerous thing about it is how quick and far it can spread. Children and old people – people with systems susceptible to infections might be affected worse.
However, reports have indicated that several of those infected are young adults to middle-aged people. That is mostly due to the new strain. No one has natural immunity to this new strain of the virus making everyone an easy target.
Health experts are looking into the possibility of the virus causing cytokine storm – an instance where a healthy immune system kicks into overdrive causing the body to attack itself. This is what experts believe caused the deaths of many adults in the last 1918 pandemic.
Recent findings say that there is a 98% survival rate for untreated cases. The Mexico and US deaths are still being examined to make sure that these people did succumb to the swine flu virus so a bit of number crunching still needs to be done to verify the 2% fatality rate.
Whether this fact will ease the paranoid – people die from the typical flu every year. It’s just that this new virus strain can hit anyone, anywhere, any time that makes it quite a scary thing.
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