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Category Archives: flu

Child deaths from flu + MRSA, again

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Folks, I am close to manuscript deadline and so keep disappearing down the rabbit hole; forgive me if I don’t post as regularly as usual, I’ll be back as soon as I can. I wanted to point out the announcement by the Centers for Disease Control late Friday that we are starting to see children dying [...]

More on MRSA pneumonia, flu and ER delays

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Folks, yesterday I posted the very sad story of 39-year-old Robert Sweitzer of Tucson, who died of MRSA pneumonia after being triaged to an 8-hour wait, in an overcrowded emergency room, during the height of flu season. As a follow-up, I want to emphasize that while necrotizing pneumonia may seem an unusual circumstance, there is one [...]

The importance of MRSA in a flu pandemic

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Constant readers will know that, in another part of my life, I write a great deal about seasonal and pandemic influenza, a subject I’ve been following since writing the first story in the American media about avian influenza H5N1 (in August 1997; find it on this page.) And people concerned about MRSA realize that flu and [...]

Rumors of the blog’s death are only slightly exaggerated

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Yes, I vanished. Yes, I had a good reason: For the past few months, I’ve been neck-deep and sinking into a massive project for the infectious-disease website CIDRAP News, examining the search for a vaccine against pandemic influenza. Very short version of the many conclusions: Let’s hope the pandemic takes a long time to arrive, [...]