Swine flu...in Chicago

5 cases of unconfirmed swine flu in Chicago. Two of them are staff at the U of C hospitals.

The reason why it takes so long to ID swine flu is that there are no local centers for testing - the Centers for Disease Control have to do them out of their labs in Atlanta.

I've talked to a couple of University researchers about the flu. One of them studied (for kicks, apparently) the path of the 1918 flu pandemic in Chicago and U of C in particular - turns out we were hosting a garrison of WWI soldiers at the time. Here they at left, drilling on Stagg Field, the U of C's old Big Ten football stadium (with no little irony, where our library is now.)


Read about what happened to these guys here!

Swine flu

It's a public emergency. I'm sure someone in the University has studied it, so on the Biological Sciences head's advice, I'm going to talk to a professor Olaf Schneewind (with such an excellent name, I'm sure he'll be awesome) for a possible Maroon article.

There are so many unanswered questions: Why hasn't Chicago, with so many people with ties to Mexico, seen an outbreak yet? Is it going to be like the 1918 pandemic, where young, healthy people like myself were the hardest hit? (Although since it killed something like 60 million people, your odds were pretty bad either way.)

More to come.