According to Mexican press accounts, the deadly swine-flu outbreak now spreading into the U.S. is linked to large-scale hog operations in Mexico run by industrial-meat giant Smithfield Foods.
Earlier studies of humidity and the flu had focused on relative humidity and found no link, said lead author After reanalyzing these past studies, which also contained data on absolute humidity, Shaman's team found a much more powerful connection. "Absolute humidity conditions explain most of these changes," Shaman said. The researchers do not know exactly what it is about low absolute humidity that the flu virus likes. But they suggest that absolute humidity levels be raised in buildings such as hospitals and medical clinics where the disease most often spreads. "This gets us a big step closer to one type of mechanism" for how the flu spreads "One really key question is how much influenza is transmitted in tropical locations"—places with high absolute humidity year-round—"and how this compares to temperate parts of the world," he said.
Das Projekt GrippeWeb wurde im Jahr 2010 am Robert Koch-Institut gegründet und soll die Aktivität und die Ausbreitung akuter Atemwegserkrankungen (hierzu zählen auch die echte Grippe und grippeähnliche Erkrankungen) in Deutschland beobachten und beschreiben. GrippeWeb arbeitet eng mit der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Influenza (AGI) zusammen. Während die AGI die Aktivität akuter Atemwegserkrankungen auf der Ebene der ärztlichen Versorgung erhebt, wendet sich GrippeWeb an die gesamte Bevölkerung.
The InfluSim Project
Making Pandemic Influenza Modelling Tools Available to the Public
With the emergence of the Mexican flu we have decided to make all our pandemic influenza modelling and simulation tools available on the web. We encourage health care policy makers to use this software. And we would appreciate if other mathematical modellers made their pandemic influenza software public, too.
E. Aramaki, S. Maskawa, and M. Morita. Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, page 1568--1576. Stroudsburg, PA, USA, Association for Computational Linguistics, (2011)