Swine flu closes schools

NEW YORK – The sons of a critically ill New York City school official diagnosed with swine flu say their father has been on a breathing tube and is barely able to talk to his family.

Adam Wiener (WEE'-ner) is disputing media reports that his father, Mitchell, had been suffering from pre-existing medical conditions before he contracted the virus. He says the only condition his father had before was gout.

He says his father is now suffering from kidney failure and a lung infection after being hospitalized with swine flu since early Wednesday.

The 23-year-old Adam Wiener has been keeping a vigil at the hospital with his mother and younger twin brothers.

Eighteen-year-old son Jordan says his dad was awake briefly and asked him about an earlier baseball injury.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

NEW YORK (AP) — Maintenance workers are scrubbing down three public schools in New York City that were closed because of a swine flu outbreak.

The city's Education Department spokeswoman Margie Feinberg says desks, tables, floors, doors and door handles are being disinfected.

The city announced Thursday that it was closing the schools in Queens after hundreds of children went home sick with flu symptoms.

An assistant principal at one of the schools is in critical condition on a ventilator.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the three schools — with more than 4,000 students altogether — will be closed for at least a week.

• Swine flu closes schools - NYC
  • We have 6 'confirmed' cases, hundreds of - sm
    • Yep. Sounds familiar. - They Said What
      • I agree, in the beginning the media was in such a hype that we got panicky - -.
      • Doctors here are down playing it. - Texas resident.

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Many health experts say WHO's pandemic declaration could have come weeks earlier but the agency became bogged down by politics. In May, several countries urged WHO not to declare a pandemic, fearing it would cause social and economic turmoil.

ATLANTA – As reports of a unique form of swine flu erupt around the world, the inevitable question arises: Is this the big one?

Is this the next big global flu epidemic that public health experts have long anticipated and worried about? Is this the novel virus that will kill millions around the world, as pandemics did in 1918, 1957 and 1968?

The short answer is it's too soon to tell.

"What makes this so difficult is we may be somewhere between an important but yet still uneventful public health occurrence here — with something that could literally die out over the next couple of weeks and never show up again — or this could be the opening act of a full-fledged influenza pandemic," said Michael Osterholm, a prominent expert on global flu outbreaks with the University of Minnesota.

"We have no clue right now where we are between those two extremes. That's the problem," he said.

Health officials want to take every step to prevent an outbreak from spiraling into mass casualties. Predicting influenza is a dicey endeavor, with the U.S. government famously guessing wrong in 1976 about a swine flu pandemic that never materialized.

"The first lesson is anyone who tries to predict influenza often goes down in flames," said Dr. Richard Wenzel, the immediate past president of the International Society for Infectious Diseases.

But health officials are being asked to make such predictions, as panic began to set in over the weekend.

The epicenter was Mexico, where the virus is blamed for 86 deaths and an estimated 1,400 cases in the country since April 13. Schools were closed, church services canceled and Mexican President Felipe Calderon assumed new powers to isolate people infected with the swine flu virus.

International concern magnified as health officials across the world on Sunday said they were investigating suspected cases in people who traveled to Mexico and come back with flu-like illnesses. Among the nations reporting confirmed cases or investigations were Canada, France, Israel and New Zealand.

Meanwhile, in the United States, there were no deaths and all patients had either recovered or were recovering. But the confirmed cases around the nation rose from eight on Saturday morning to 20 by Sunday afternoon, including eight high school kids in New York City — a national media center. The New York Post's front page headline on Sunday was "Pig Flu Panic."

The concern level rose even more when federal officials on Sunday declared a public health emergency — a procedural step, they said, to mobilize antiviral medicine and other resources and be ready if the U.S. situation gets worse.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials say that so far swine flu cases in this country have been mild. But they also say more cases are likely to be reported, at least partly because doctors and health officials across the country are looking intensively for suspicious cases.

And, troublingly, more severe cases are also likely, said Dr. Richard Besser, the CDC's acting director, in a Sunday news conference.

"As we continue to look for cases, we are going to see a broader spectrum of disease," he predicted. "We're going to see more severe disease in this country."

Besser also repeated what health officials have said since the beginning — they don't understand why the illnesses in Mexico have been more numerous and severe than in the United States. In fact, it's not even certain that new infections are occurring. The numbers could be rising simply because everyone's on the lookout.

He also said comparison to past pandemics are difficult.

"Every outbreak is unique," Besser said.

The new virus is called a swine flu, though it contains genetic segments from humans and birds viruses as well as from pigs from North America, Europe and Asia. Health officials had seen combinations of bird, pig and human virus before — but never such an intercontinental mix, including more than one pig virus.

More disturbing, this virus seems to spread among people more easily than past swine flus that have sometimes jumped from pigs to people.

There's a historical cause for people to worry.

Flu pandemics have been occurring with some regularity since at least the 1500s, but the frame of reference for health officials is the catastrophe of 1918-19. That one killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people worldwide.

Disease testing and tracking were far less sophisticated then, but the virus appeared in humans and pigs at about the same time and it was known as both Spanish flu and swine flu. Experts since then have said the deadly germ actually originated in birds.

But pigs may have made it worse. That pandemic began with a wave of mild illness that hit in the spring of 1918, followed by a far deadlier wave in the fall which was most lethal to young, healthy adults. Scientists have speculated that something happened to the virus after the first wave — one theory held that it infected pigs or other animals and mutated there — before revisiting humans in a deadlier form.

Pigs are considered particularly susceptible to both bird and human viruses and a likely place where the kind of genetic reassortment can take place that might lead to a new form of deadly, easily spread flu, scientists believe.

Such concern triggered public health alarm in 1976, when soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J., became sick with an unusual form of swine flu.

Federal officials vaccinated 40 million Americans. The pandemic never materialized, but thousands who got the shots filed injury claims, saying they suffered a paralyzing condition and other side effects from the vaccinations.

To this day, health officials don't know why the 1976 virus petered out.

Flu shots have been offered in the United States since the 1940s, but new types of flu viruses have remained a threat. Global outbreaks occurred again in 1957 and 1968, though the main victims were the elderly and chronically ill.

In the last several years, experts have been focused on a form of bird flu that was first reported in Asia. It's a highly deadly strain that has killed more than 250 people worldwide since 2003. Health officials around the world have taken steps to prepare for the possibility of that becoming a global outbreak, but to date that virus has not gained the ability to spread easily from person to person.

At age 75, Shirley Jones is going to go topless in an upcoming episode of "The Cleaner" on A&E.  The CDC is predicting that millions of unsuspecting viewers will be struck blind or suffer from the more "explosive" symptoms of severe gastrointestinal flu.

We call upon A&E to provide appropriate warnings, as there is no vaccine available for this one.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/04282009/gossip/pagesix/75_and_still_hot_166562.htm

Wondering if you can help me with this. 

Due to many problems within the school district I have decided to start a special parents group to address the situations that were not handled properly, teacher/student relationships, and on. 

What questions/and concerns would you ask of your school if you were not satisfied with them,;

Thanks for your time.

No, it's not fair that you should have to pay for a private school, but that might just be what is best for your daughter.  We decided 16 years ago that our 3 children would not go to public schools.  We have spent a fortune over the years, but I do not regret it for an instant. 

Having kids from 7 up to 19 in our district, I've had this happen a few times.  But the difference is, our school district sends home on the very first day of school, a form that tells you if there is an emergency and kids have to be dismissed early, what you want to happen.  I elect for my kids to get on the bus and if no one is home, they will be sent to Latchkey.  When they take the bus, the bus driver will not let them off until an adult appears.  She will sit there and honk for a few minutes and then go.  Working with headphones on makes that difficult too, but I normally get someone calling telling me they heard about the school, etc. as a warning.  They don't have time to call parents and I understand that.  Not to mention, if the power is out at our schools, the phones go out as well.

Now we have had practice evacuations in case of fire, bomb threats, etc at the lower age and the teacher has to get them to our local fire dept, which is a very short walk away.  They wait there until the buses can get there and take them home.  They had to do this one time and it was a mess.  Of course parents heard about the bomb threats (blanket threat over the whole district so everyone was evacuated), so they showed up to get their kids or sent friends, but they would not release kids to no one but parents.  No grandparents, nothing.  Reason being, if a true emergency like 9/11 happened, would they honestly have time to get those emergency forms?  No one knew that they were not going to release the kids to parents only.  Now that they've experienced it and people wrote letters complaining etc, it is now documented on the same form as mentioned above about parents only picking up their kids during a situation like this. 

I know its hard, but I would at least write a letter explaining your situation, but be compassionate to what they are experiencing as well and come up with a compromise.  They shouldn't have released your kids to your brother without any emergency forms for sure.  I'm in a very small district where everybody knows everyone and they still would not release kids that day.  They knew they were liable.

I have 3 kids in elementary school.  When they come home and tell me they owe money, I immediately send a check the next day.  However, several times, my youngest who is in kindergarten would forget to tell me.  I never got a note from the school.  One day, I got a phone call from the district office saying that if his balance wasn't brought current immediately, he would receive PB&J.  I was very indignant as I had never been notified.  Their response was -- you should know how much your child has in his account from whether or not he packs his lunch.  That's all well and good in a perfect world, but sometimes my kids eat breakfast without telling me and sometimes they buy extras (milk, bottled water, etc).  I can't keep up and the school district hasn't upgraded the computer system to allow us access to our kids' accounts.

I have no problem with these rules, but the parents should be given ample notification before applying the PB&J rule. 

Out of curiosity here.... in the area you live in, do your schools basically become just a babysitting facility after the CRCTs are administered until the last day of school?  I've been through CRCT testing with my children now for 5 years and the minute they finish those tests, from that day on until the last day of school they're watching movies, spending more play time, etc. at school & very little actual school work.  It's like the schools are busy teaching the CRCT criteria and once the testing is completed they don't do diddly squat for the last month of school. 

What about in your area? 

They are ages 13 (boy) and 10 (girl).  My sister died at age 27 of cancer and left a husband and 8 yo boy.  My sister was also 6 months pregnant when they found the cancer and she lost the little girl after going to MD Anderson and all the treatment, and my sister only lived 6 months.

There is such a concern here because of my having kidney cancer and given 6 months to live, but I have been in remission for 4 years now.

My sister had breast cancer, in remission for 5 years.

I am open to any help anyone has, be it good or bad.  Thanks.