Swine Flu and Its Effects

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 : Swine Flu offers information about the spread of swine flu cases in Canada and the measures taken by the government to control it.