Swine flu: warning signs that someone is going sour

Since I talk a lot about flu in my real life as well as on the blog, I get questions from moms and care givers who wonder when they should start to get worried about a sick child or relative. It’s context dependent, of course. The same symptoms that would be shrugged off at any other time take on a different meaning during a flu outbreak, especially when everyone seems uncertain about what is happening or what might happen. There’s nothing irrational about this. Infection with influenza virus is always potentially serious and when the young and healthy are in the cross-hairs even more so. Many other viruses can cause the same initial symptoms (“flu-like symptoms”), outside of flu outbreaks the likelihood those symptoms represent influenza infections is small. When flu is circulating in the community, however, the likelihood that the very same symptoms are from an influenza infection goes way up (the reasons can be found via an elementary application of Bayes Theorem in probability theory). So knowing when things are going sour is more important.

The question came up at one of CDC’s press briefings last week, and CDC’s answer seemed to me quite helpful, so I retrieved it from the transcript of the presser for posting here. The context is the extra risk from swine flu infection (or any flu, for that matter) for those with “underlying medical conditions.” There are two questions here. The first related to what constituted an underlying medical condition. Some of the examples cited seemed quite common (asthma, COPD, pregnancy), so much so that a large proportion of the population might be considered to have an underlying condition. So CDC’s Dr. Schuchat addressed the question of warning signs that indicate the person should seek immediate medical attention.

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