Swine Flu- Some Vital Information

“Swine Flu” as the name itself indicates comes from swine “the pig” scientifically also called as “H1N1 Flu”.

This recently heard of virus in April 2009 had been last found in 1976 in a US army recruit. This virus today has been increasing speedily, infecting a lot of people in the US and internationally. 45 US states including the District of Columbia have reported of this virus, with 3009 laboratory confirmed cases and 3 deaths.

This virus generally infects pigs. When humans come in contact with these infected pigs is when the virus gets transferred to humans. This virus does not spread by eating pork as any kind of virus including the H1N1 virus is killed when the pork is cooked internally at a temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

It spreads from person to person through cough and sneezes of patients suffering from this virus. The most common symptoms, in patients infected with this virus are cough, fever, sore throat, head ache, runny nose, body ache, fatigue, diarrhea,vomiting and nausea.

This could be more problematic for women who are pregnant. Not alone for Swine flu, but, a pregnant woman has a weak immune system for any general flu too, which increases her chances of catching any virus easily. So any pregnant woman diagnosed of H1N1 virus should take prescription flu medicines.

Vaccines are now available for the swine influenza in pigs and there are efforts being made to develop a vaccine for humans with this virus too. Though there are vaccines for swine influenza H3N2 virus which may provide a partial protection but it may not necessarily work for H1N1 virus.

There are some other medications like Tamiflu and Relenza that could help avoid swine virus, but what the doctor’s and expert’s fear is that if someone decided to take this pill for a month and stopped after that, they would catch this virus at that point in time.

The best that one could do to prevent this infection from spreading is to wash their hands as often as possible and keep the infected patients away from other people.