U.S. Says Older People Appear Safer From New Flu Strain - NYTimes.com

U.S. Says Older People Appear Safer From New Flu Strain - NYTimes.com:

"...federal health officials said on Wednesday that people born before 1957 appear to have some immunity to the swine flu virus now circulating.

Tests on blood serum from older people showed that they had antibodies that attacked the new virus, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, chief flu epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a telephone news conference."

It would be interesting to see the distribution of ages in all confirmed incidents. Who aggregates that data?


Self-Serving Status Update

I've continued working on the Mesa H1N1 interactive timeline site. It now includes a graph of cumulative incidents (confirmed, suspected, fatal) over time. The number of new incidents worldwide has grown enough that I'm going to need to refactor the code, to better limit (through aggregation) the number of incident markers which must be placed on the map.

I'm still having trouble with a discrepancy in the time-series graph. The development server yields 86 deaths worldwide as of 20 May 2009, whereas the production server shows 154 deaths. Both are supposed to be using the same code, and the same database. I'm reloading the production database now.

It appears that http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com is still the best source of incident data, although there are a few discrepancies in its records. If anyone knows of an authoritative source of detailed incident data, please let me know via the comments.