With school starting back up again this past week and many new reports about the H1N1 flu virus popping up all over the country, many people are asking the simple question "should we be worried?". The White House has just recently put out a statement predicting anywhere between 30,000 - 90,000 deaths during this upcoming flu season due to this strain of the virus and the WHO (World Health Organization) is expecting an "explosion" of H1N1 cases world wide considering the new upcoming flu season. But what is the big difference between this strain of the flu and the normal virus? Every year we lose up to about 40,000 people to the normal strain of the flu virus, but most of them are young children (under 5) or elderly citizens (over 65), but the H1N1 virus has been known to target more young adults and teenagers than normal. The sickness has also been known to be worse in this target audience. But the good news it that researchers do not think that this strain of the virus will mutate into anything more dangerous. In fact it tends to overwhelm other strains of the flu virus rather than combining with them which makes it a much more solid form of the virus.

Many researchers say that this is because it is a new strain of the virus and that most people that were born after the 1970's outbreak have not developed any immunity to the new H1N1 virus. It has also been said that the young adults can tend to get hit harder because their immune system is healthier. Normally a healthy immune system is a good thing, but when introduced to a new pathogen like the H1N1 virus a healthy immune system can sometimes drop a body's equivalent to a nuclear bomb attempting to kill the virus and in the process destroying organ tissue, good and healthy cells, and causing damage to it's own immune system. A weaker immune system is not always capable of fighting the virus as hard and in turn lets the virus runs its course through the normal methods.

But contrary to what we have been allowed to believe, H1N1 is not a totally new strain of the flu virus that jumped from pigs to humans. In fact there have been numerous accounts of H1N1 throughout the 20th century, the most recent one was in Spain during the 1970s. The reason that it was first called the swine flu was because it had one related protien in common with the North American swine flu, but under closer examination it was seen to have been a mixture of different European strains of swine and avian flu, North American strains of swine and human flu, and a couple of different asian strains as well.

Now that you have some of the relevant information I hope you are feeling a little more comfortable! So lets recap:

- The strain is not new but in fact it has been documented on numerous occasions throughout history (they were not pleasant but not catastrophic instances compared to our normal seasonal flu virus)
- The virus tends to target older children and younger adults due to a lack of immunities and they are the ones that tend to get sicker because of overkill via their healthy immune system. But the good news is that younger people with a healthy immune system to begin with will recover and bounce back much faster than the elderly or toddlers that are normally affected by the flu.
- This strain of the flu can effectively be prevented through the standard health precautions like washing you hands, covering your mouth and nose when you sneeze or cough, and staying home when you are sick. For more precautions and advisories check here:
http://www.cdc.gov/H1N1flu/qa.htm

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Go ahead... Check our sources!

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/24/us.swine.flu.projections/index.html
http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/notes/h1n1_second_wave_20090828/en/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,545142,00.html
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090902/swine_flu_mutate_090902/20090902?hub=Health