According to the Centers for Disease Control, persons contracting this strain of flu can expect to be sick for five-to-seven days with upper respiratory symptoms, fever, body aches, coughing, cold symptoms, and fatigue. If a patient rests and drinks plenty of fluids, maybe works through some Sudoku, a full recovery should be expected.
More than 1,000 people in Mexico have come down with swine flu, and a few cases have been reported in the U.S. So far, no one in the U.S. has died from swine flu; in fact, most were not hospitalized. To put this into perspective, the CDC says that every year an more than six million people in the U.S. get the flu, more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from complications, and about 36,000 people die from the disease each year.
So, what makes swine flu different and what are the chances it will become a pandemic? Swine flu is a strain of influenza type A H1N1 virus. In other words, it's a Type-A flu, which is what most flu strains are. This new strain has a molecular twist: It is composed of avian and swine influenza genes, as reported by the CDC and WHO. The virus travels effectively across porous borders, which raises concerns that a true pandemic pandemonium will erupt soon. The same warning was issued across the U.S. for SARS and bird flu. Given that this strain is a hybrid of avian and swine flu, the chances of a pandemic spreading throughout the U.S., meaning far more cases than the usual 6+million cases of Type A flu seen annually can best be explained with the following graphic:
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