After the first reports were published about swine flu among kids at St. Francis Preparatory High School in Queens, N.Y., where I live, a friend called me in a panic. Like many parents in the neighborhood, she was wondering if should keep her 10-year-old home from school.
Her house is a stone’s throw from the school, and mine is just a few miles from hers. “I’m scared,” she said. “One of his best friends has an older brother who goes to St. Francis.”
Fear was spreading faster than any virus could. Hand sanitizer was flying off the shelves. Then the wet wipes started to disappear. People walking through busy shopping areas, and even back streets, were wearing surgical masks, a habit many Asian immigrants had brought from China. I drove past one car with three mask-clad passengers in back.
When a girl at my daughter’s high school complained of a cough, the nurse gave her a choice of wearing a mask for the rest of the day – or going home. (Guess which she chose?) A lot of schoolkids stayed home; my friend told me of one parent who kept her children home for three days straight, and she lived in another borough.
“Tell them to wash their hands a lot,” was the only advice I could offer.
Reporters like myself often parachute into a region to report about a war or an election, but in this case, I just happen to live here. As journalists we often feel insulated by our status — we’re observers, after all, not participants — and on some unconscious level I think I believed my family and I were immune.
I was wrong.
The fear, meanwhile, fueled rumors. My friend Mary, who lives nearby, said her daughter stayed home from public school because she wasn’t feeling good one day. Her friends called that afternoon and asked if she was alright — they heard she had swine flu. Four of the kids in her class had been to Mexico over spring break, Mary’s daughter told her. The next day she corrected herself: only one had gone, “and that was to Jamaica.”
But it soon became clear it didn’t really matter who you knew or where they had been. The cat was out of the bag.
Some parents wanted the city to close all schools. But while St. Francis was shut down for a week and a half, a lot of students with nothing to do went to hang out in another enclosed gathering place … the mall.
When my own 15-year-old started coughing on Monday evening, I thought little of it. She’s pretty hardy and hadn’t missed a day of school since sixth or seventh grade. But when she woke up at 3 a.m. groaning loudly enough to wake me, I realized I’d been mistaken.
Sure, most years my daughter didn’t get the flu. But this was a novel strain. A new virus.
It was a miserable night — for our whole family, but mostly for her. She didn’t know what hit her. She was hot, and then she was cold. She shivered and coughed and groaned. Her throat was killing her, and by morning she was whispering.
“Will I have to go to the hospital?” she whispered.
“What if I gave it to my friends?”
“Will they shut down my school?”
I was worried, but not nearly as much as I would have been just a few days earlier. It was becoming fairly clear that young people in the United States weren’t dying of this flu strain, and most recovered without being hospitalized. If you weren’t very young or very old or pregnant, and you didn’t have diabetes, heart disease, H.I.V. or a compromised immune system, you probably wouldn’t even get a definitive diagnosis, and any available Tamiflu, the anti-flu drug, would be reserved for someone else.
An infectious disease specialist had told me on Friday that health officials were reassured by the way the outbreak was unfolding here. “If it weren’t for Mexico, this would be a page-15 story,” he’d said.
One thing is clear: we have good surveillance systems. Everyone was collecting data and phoning it in. When the high-school attendance office called, they didn’t just want to know my child was home sick, they wanted a list of symptoms: Did she have a cough? Sore throat? Fever? How high? Fifty kids in the school were absent, up from a daily average of 20 at most.
We had good information, and it was easily accessible to the public, not just through the traditional media but through the internet and twitter.
You could go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site and find out whether face masks work (unclear), what you can do to minimize your risk (wash your hands, stay away from crowds, don’t touch your nose and face) and what you can do to help (sneeze into a tissue or your sleeve, stay home if you’re sick).
I still don’t know if my daughter actually has swine flu. The doctor who examined her was pretty sure she did — he called it A(H1N1), which somehow sounded less sinister. But there was no need for a test, and she was otherwise healthy and therefore not a candidate for Tamiflu anyway.
He listened to her lungs, proclaimed them all clear, and swabbed her throat for a strep culture, which was negative. The prescription was the usual for flu: Motrin, lots of fluids, rest. Oh, and ice-pops for the sore throat. We were to watch out for shortness of breath, worsening fever or unusual behavior.
She had completely lost her voice by then, so she borrowed my phone as we drove home and texted into it. “Throat like sandpaper stop 4 ice pops.”
By evening she was over the worst of it. She sat with us at dinner but had drunk so much tea she wasn’t really hungry. Every time she coughed we dove under the table. But I knew she was much better when, as she prepared for a world history exam, she had just one question, “What am I going to do about my chem test?”
And I have one lingering concern myself. If — and when — this rolls around again, in a fiercer form, will people think health officials are crying wolf and be blase about it? If this current flu does turn out to be much better than feared — and we all hope it does — the public health campaign must not stop. People need very clear explanations about why and how this virus could mutate into something worse.
source of news:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/when-swine-flu-hits-home/?ref=health
