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Category Archives: influenza
February 2, 2010
Once again, flu and bacterial co-infection
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With the H1N1 pandemic trending down, it may seem that the question of how much bacterial co-infection affects the outcome of flu is less important than it was. But though the pandemic is subsiding — for ever, for this season, or just until a third wave, who can say — researchers are just now getting [...]
December 3, 2009
NEJM: Antibiotics for pneumonia in H1N1
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The New England Journal of Medicine has been running an open-access blog on H1N1 flu, and they’ve put up a post on when to give antibiotics to prevent secondary bacterial pneumonia, including MRSA pneumonia, in flu patients.
There’s a table of key clinical points to consider, and these important points are made:
For the child or adult [...]
November 26, 2009
CDC warns of deaths from H1N1 flu + bacterial infections
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Over at CIDRAP, my colleague Lisa Schnirring writes tonight about the CDC’s concern over increasing numbers of deaths from bacterial pneumonia in people who have come down with H1N1 flu.
We’ve talked about this before here. Our concern of course has been MRSA, and there is good evidence that there have been fatal MRSA infections in [...]
November 2, 2009
It’s World Pneumonia Day
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Readers, we talk all the time here about the unexpected and deadly attack of MRSA pneumonia, both on its own and as a sequela of influenza infection. But we should acknowledge that MRSA pneumonia is part of an epidemic of pneumonia, an under-appreciated disease of severe lung inflammation that takes the lives of 2 million [...]
September 30, 2009
MRSA involvement in H1N1 flu: UPDATE
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The CDC’s MMWR report on their analysis of bacterial co-infections in H1N1 flu deaths has been placed online here.
And there are two excellent analyses of it by the marvelous blogs Effect Measure and Mike the Mad Biologist.
September 29, 2009
More evidence of MRSA involvement in H1N1 flu
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When the H1N1 pandemic started at the end of last April, few of the case-patients seemed to have any secondary bacterial infections. This was unusual: In the 3 20th-c pandemics, the only ones for which there are good records, bacterial pneumonias seem to have accounted for a high percentage of illness and death. But H1N1 [...]
September 11, 2009
A parent’s plea and confusion
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I want to highlight a comment that was left on Labor Day by a woman named Valorie in Arkansas (thank you for reading, Valorie). She said:
I am just now learning about all of this and am very concerned about my 12 year old daughter. We were only 10 days into the school year, and she [...]
July 22, 2009
New England Journal editorial: MRSA, H1N1 parallels
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There’s a very interesting piece in a recent New England Journal of Medicine (unfortunately, only the abstract is online) that draws parallels between MRSA and public expectations for pandemic flu. Written by Dr. Kent Sepkowitz, chief of infection control at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and one of the authors of the “Medical [...]
June 23, 2009
H1N1 and MRSA – first disclosed case
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Readers, once again there’s a lot of MRSA-related news piling up, and I’ll try to roll some of it out over the next few days. But first, today we have to deal with an event that many of us have been anticipating, though not with any pleasure: the first known report of a MRSA death [...]
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