The public and the medical community alike have had difficulty sorting through the variety of sometimes conflicting information about H1N1 influenza. First of all, what should we even call it? At the beginning of the outbreak, most people were calling it "swine flu," and this is still the most widely recognized short-hand way that folks will talk about it. It wasn't really the pigs' fault, so this was not a scientifically accurate name. The Dallas County Health Department is utilizing the term "Pandemic H1N1 Influenza Virus 2009", or pH1N1 for short. "Novel influenza A (H1N1)" and "swine-origin influenza virus (S-OIV)" are other aliases for this bug. As for me, whenever I say "swine flu" or "H1N1", people seem to know what I am talking about. At this point, we still don’t know what to expect about how severe this flu season might be. The New York Times reports on this wide variation in the estimated number of potential cases. The plan to vaccinate is also still up in the air. We have submitted our request for vaccine to the state, but we do not expect it to be available until mid-to-late October. The Economist gives this fascinating discussion about how to best allocate vaccine if there is limited supply. It turns out that the most effective way to protect the entire population is to protect kids and their caregivers – good news for our patient population if supplies are scarce.
Stay tuned throughout the fall. I expect that information will be changing rapidly, and I will do my best to update the website and blog with pertinent information. You can sign up for e-mail updates and practice newsletters by using the “Subscribe” box at the bottom left corner of our homepage. You can also subscribe to my blog by clicking here; that way you can receive automatic notification about any changes in our vaccine program.