Health

Swine flu versus cold symptoms
by Zuzana Zelenakova

How do you recognize swine flu from a seasonal cold? That is a very tricky question these days. You wake up coughing, sneezing and have that familiar feeling of aching in your muscles. Swine flu pandemic gave to these quite regular symptoms a whole new dimension. Especially moms must face a serious dilemma. Do I send my child to school or do I keep him at home in case it is not just a cold? A cold is described as milder respiratory illness in comparison to flu. The difference between the symptoms is that cold can make you feel ill for a few days while flu even for several weeks. The latter can develop into a serious health condition and get you easily into the hospital. "Y! ou really have no way of knowing if it's the flu or just a cold," says Richard Wenzel, former president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. You may wonder whether fever is not an indicator of flu, or swine flu in this case. "At the beginning of the outbreak in Mexico, only 30 percent of patients hospitalized with the infection had fever initially," he continues, "and 15 percent of patients never developed a fever at all." What got these people into the hospital was mostly chest pain and shortness of breath. And what are H1N1 virus symptoms officially stated by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? Cough, sore throat, body aches, runny nose, diarrhea, vomiting and chills. "The CDC is stuck. They've defined flu as having a fever, which means they're going to miss a lot of cases," says Richard Wenzel. Fever seems to be the point where you should isolate from your surroundings. So, in the end it is up to us if we stay home or go out and maybe spread the vir! us that has already proved as extremely dangerous at times.
r elated story (sgx15435): http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnews/20090921/ts_usnews/seasonalco...

by Zuzana Zelenakova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

PocketNews is a new real-time news broadcaster delivering the latest and hottest news right to your pocket ! With global clients who want to be kept up to date, PocketNews is everyone's way of keeping in touch with the World.

posted by Blog TechSource @ 2:15 PM