While the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) are concentrating on vaccinating as many people possible for the H1N1 flu virus, a new virus snuck in and is hitting the East Coast with a ferociousness not seen before, hospitalizing hundreds of young children.
How can you protect yourself and your family? Get on our Swine Flu Prevention Kit right away – not a single person using our kit to naturally boost their immune system has reported getting the swine flu.
November 17, 2009
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Runny nose, fever, cough, even pneumonia — the symptoms sound like swine flu but children hospitalized at one U.S. hospital in fact had a “rhinovirus”, better known as a serious form of the common cold virus, doctors said on Tuesday. Hundreds of children treated at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia had a “rhinovirus”, and federal health investigators are trying to find out if it was a new strain, and if this is going on elsewhere in the country.
“What began to happen in early September is we started seeing more children coming to our emergency room with significant respiratory illness,” said Dr. Susan Coffin, medical director of infection control and prevention at the hospital.
Doctors and parents assumed it was the new pandemic H1N1 swine flu, which would be expected to re-emerge as schools began in September. But it was not, Coffin said in a telephone interview. The hospital, unlike most hospitals in the United States, runs a test that can diagnose 10 different respiratory viruses, including influenza but also rhinoviruses, parainfluenza viruses and other germs that make kids sick.
“The data showed us it wasn’t H1N1, but instead was this rhinovirus infection,” Coffin said.