Swine Flu and Its Effects

Swine Flu and Its Effects

By: Ruchand

What is swine flu?

Swine is the biological name that refers to pigs. Swine flu or
swine influenza is a common viral infection that affects pigs
all over the world. The influenza virus strains are responsible
for all swine flu infections.

Symptoms in pigs

Swine flu causes fever and severe weight loss along with
breathing problems in pigs. Though the flu is deemed to be
severe, it rarely results in the death of the pigs. In most of
the cases when the affected pig is pregnant, it results in the
death of the baby pigs.

Since the flu has a very high proficiency of spreading quick and
in large numbers, it results in huge monetary loss for the farm
owners in terms of medical expenses and in the sale price of the
pigs after cure.

Spreading of the disease among pigs

Once a pig is affected by the disease, it easily transmits the
disease causing virus to the other pigs through various means.
The most common is through direct contact with the healthy ones
by touching each others' noses. This along with sneezing or
coughing directly spreads the virus through the atmosphere. It
takes a maximum of only a couple of days to affect a whole farm
of five hundred pigs. Once the existence of the disease is
confirmed in a farm, the farm owners take utmost care to check
each and every pig and segregate the healthy ones from the
affected pigs.

Swine flu in humans

There have been very few occurrences of swine flu in humans in
the past. When they did, the most probable infectors were the
workers in the swine farms, especially those who directly work
on the pigs. Though it is rumored that swine flu spreads through
consumption of pork, scientists and researchers have confirmed
that the probability of such occurrences are minimal. In
addition, the disease very rarely spreads from humans to humans.

Symptoms in humans

Swine flu in humans causes acute fever, diarrhea sudden weight
loss, dry coughing, pain in the muscles and joints and frequent
dizziness as a result of weakness of the body. Occurrences of
swine flu in the world

There have been only a few occurrences of the original swine flu
since the past century. The global outbreak of flu in 2009 that
was suspected to be swine flu though is not actually the actual
swine flu. The virus responsible for this pandemic disease is a
result of a mixture of strands of the normal swine virus, human
influenza virus and avian influenza virus. Since this is not a
normal swine flu virus, it has the tendency of spreading from
one man to another. This was first detected in parts of the
United States and Canada. Within a matter of a week or two, the
disease had managed to spread to almost all countries of the
world. The WHO had released a worldwide alert on the spread of
the disease and has also directed the countries to take the
necessary measures to prevent it from spreading further.

About the author:
<a target="_new"
href="http://www.cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20090430/09043
0_swine_canada/20090430?hub=CP24Home"> Swine Flu </a>offers
information about the spread of swine flu cases in Canada and
the measures taken by the government to control it.