Regular flu viruses strike each winter and also can be deadly. They kill about 36,000
Americans and hospitalize 200,000 annually, according to the CDC. The swine flu virus, which contains genes from pigs, birds and humans, is something of a mystery. Just 50 cases of swine flu were reported worldwide in people from 1958 to 2005, said Christopher Olsen, a flu researcher at UW-Madison, who published a study on those cases in 2007.
Another 12 cases have been reported since 2005, not including the current outbreak, according to the CDC. Unlike the current outbreak, almost all of those cases involved direct contact with infected pigs, Olsen said. Of the 50 cases he studied, seven people died — including a 32-year-old pregnant woman in Wisconsin who died in 1988 after having contact with pigs at a county fair in the southeast part of the state; her baby was delivered and survived. Her husband and three health-care workers who treated her also were sickened, and 19 pig exhibitors at the fair were found to have been infected without becoming ill.
In 1976, a solider died and a dozen were sickened by swine flu at Fort Dix in New Jersey. With the current outbreak, it’s too early to tell how much people previously infected with regular flu viruses may be immune to swine flu, said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, another flu researcher at UW-Madison. "It’s very difficult to predict if the virus will take off or not because we don’t know how transmissible the virus is," Kawaoka said. Still, the outbreak is "a major concern," he said. "It could have a major impact on the economy."
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