Swine Infection: Where Did It Come From?
It goes by many names these days as it races across America and other parts of the world. Some call it the Swine Infection, others refer to it as the Swine Flu, while others use the more politically correct H1N1 flu.
Whatever you refer to it as, this dangerous strain of the flu has caught the attention of Americans and it’s doctors. The reason it is named Swine Flu or Infection is that the original strain of the disease was passed to veterinarians and other folk working with hogs by the animals themselves.
When the virus was contracted from the hogs by people, flu like symptoms didn’t necessarily appear as natural human antibodies took care of this. However, when typical flu symptoms did occur, the name of the disease changed from Swine Flu or Infection to Zoonotic Swine Flu. Although it was difficult to convince people at the time, the virus cannot be caught by eating pork meat. Swine Infection history dates back to the early 1900s when 1918 saw a pandemic of human influenza and people and pigs became ill at the same time.
The H1N1 strain we hear about today is a distant form of that same infection from all those years ago. During 1976, five soldiers at the military base Ft Dix, New Jersey, died of the disease which was present for only a couple of weeks, and was contained therein. At this time a vaccination was available but due to the fact that numerous elderly people died a short while after having the vaccination, it became the subject of public controversy. The population naturally panicked and many refused to have the injection even though there was never any proof that it was directly linked to the death of the elderly people.
Fast forward to 2009 and you have what WHO, the world health organization, calls a public health emergency that should concern the entire world. The first two cases were found in the United States and then hundreds popped up in Mexico. Pigs were also found infected in Alberta, Canada.
The disease is caused when pigs reared in close proximity touch nose to nose and mucus is transferred from one to another of them. It only takes a matter of days for the full herd to be infected and wild boars often spread the disease further to neighboring farms.
Swine Infection shocked America and other parts of the world. The outbreak started in Mexico, and nex thine we know it’s the 2009 flu pandemic. Now that we know the history of swine infection, does this mean we are immune?
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Swine Infection History
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