The article I read was about the H1N1 flu and its effects on pregnant women. I'll give a summary of it below, but here is the link if you want to read the whole thing.
Some major points the article made were that pregnant women had a one in five chance of dying from H1N1 and that about two-thirds of the women who had given birth while being sick with H1N1 delivered preterm babies or a little less than half delivered low weight babies.
The CDC had gathered data about the death rate of pregnant women sick with H1N1 and determined that the mortality rate was almost 22%. However, it also said that pregnant women were more likely to survive when given antivirals quickly. So the CDC wanted to emphasize the importance of immunization for pregnant women and quickly using antivirals to treat them.
Besides being a threat to women who had been pregnant when they caught the disease, H1N1 proved to be threatening to women who had just given birth and then became severely ill.
Many of the women who died, however, had underlying conditions that could have contributed to the fact that they'd died or had birth problems.
The article also stressed that the data was limited seeing as it relied on case reports on a hot line the CDC set up and due to these underlying conditions many of the pregnant women had.
This article relates to our class because H1N1 virus has become epidemic in the United States recently, and was especially prominent a couple of years ago. It also talked about how treating it quickly with antivirals would help prevent it from getting worse and give the woman a better chance at surviving.
I thought that this article was interesting because everyone knows about swine flu and is cautious about it, but I never thought that it could affect some people more than others. The statistics in the article were pretty surprising to me - like that 63.6% of women who delivered while in the hospital for swine flu gave birth preterm when the national average of preterm births is only 12.3%.
Overall, this article gave me a new look at an infectious epidemic disease that I thought I already knew a good deal about.
This article really hit home to many topics discussed in our class this semester. First off, I thought this article was particularly shocking because it said that death rate of pregnant women who have H1N1 have a mortality rate was almost 22%. This is really hard to believe because I thought H1N1 was something this country had under control, but over 1 in 5 pregnant women who have it can be at a high risk of dying. This is sad as well, because the babies who are born who could have had no problems are now preterm and could suffer with more life threatening issues. Our class really emphasized the importance of using good sanitation and hygiene to help avoid getting sick in the first place. I also saw this article as a last reminder for pregnant women. It mentions that pregnant women who are given the antivirals quickly are more likely to survive. After hearing this, why wouldn't pregnant women, and all people in general at that matter, just take the antivirals right away?! This would help decrease the mortality rate as well. I think people have been taking the common flu and H1N1 too lightly and need to stay aware about the epidemic which has caused a lot of sicknesses and deaths in the United States in the past several years.
ReplyDeleteThis article especially caught my attention for the fact that pregnant women are getting H1N1 in the first place. It made me wonder why they wouldn't have been vaccinated for it beforehand. This also made me think of how vaccinations protect not only the mother, but the child she is carrying as wll. Had the mothers been vaccinated, their children would not have been born and risk having other serious helath complications, as Christine metnioned. This concern of mothers with a one in five chance of death could be prevented if they had only been immunized from H1N1.
ReplyDeleteI strongly agree with you Kate, you would think that especially people planning on having a baby would be vaccinated against H1N1. Also like Christine said over 1 in 5 pregnant women who have it can be at high risk of dying. This is surprising because i had not known that H1N1 was actually this fatal of a disease.
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