# 3431
One of the headlines running around the news services right now is:
Study: New flu inefficient in attacking people
Which is used as a banner for an AP story on the CDC/MIT ferret study which was released yesterday.
While the headline is a bit misleading (and not usually written by the reporter), there is nothing inaccurate that I could find in the text of the story.
Except . . . it completely ignored the other study released on the same day which showed high transmission rates of the virus among ferrets.
All of which proves that if you need to pick and choose your news sources carefully – and whenever possible, go with more than one source.
Yesterday we got a terrific overview by Helen Branswell (see Branswell On The Transmissibility Studies), and last night Maryn McKenna and Lisa Schnirring writing for CIDRAP put together this excellent overview and comparison of the two studies.
Studies: Novel H1N1 affects deep lung tissue, transmits fairly well
Maryn McKenna and Lisa Schnirring
Staff Writers
Jul 2, 2009 (CIDRAP News) – The novel H1N1 (swine) influenza now circling the globe causes more serious lung disease than seasonal flu strains and sheds from the lung and throat tissue where it reproduces at higher rates, according to two animal studies published today—findings that could explain autopsies and case reports of severe pneumonia as well as the virus's rapid spread.
And while the studies, conducted in ferrets and mice, agree that the new flu passes fairly well between individuals, they disagree over the effectiveness of different modes of transmission.
A team from Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands found that the virus transmits easily between ferrets housed in cages whose walls are 4 inches apart. But a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the novel virus only transmitted well when the ferrets shared direct contact—a sign, that team said, that the new virus has not yet fully adapted to mammals.
The European team, though, warned that the new H1N1 is adapted enough to compete with seasonal flu strains for turf in humans. It "has the ability to persist in the human population, potentially with more severe clinical consequences," they wrote.
Both studies were published online today by the journal Science.
We live in a world dominated by media sources that believe that press releases are `news’, and are all-too-often simply passed on without thought or question.
Polls are quite often another source of `news’, even though they don’t reflect reality, only the public’s perception of reality.
Some days, I feel like I need to wear hip boots while reading the news wires. It gets that deep.
Which is why I tend to go back to sources I trust, like CIDRAP and Helen Branswell, and other stalwarts like Maggie Fox of Reuters, Jason Gale of Bloomberg, and blogs like Effect Measure , Virology, and Aetiology when I’m looking for `science driven’ stories.
Speaking of which, the Reveres at Effect Measure weigh in on the ferret studies this morning as well, and it is certainly worth reading:
In Reliable Sources In Flublogia I give a partial listing of some of the sources I use practically every day as I search out new information on pandemic influenza.
Even though I may not always agree with their conclusions, I use them because they have a track record I can trust and admire.
There are other solid sources of information out there, of course. But for every `good’ one, there seem to be at least 10 schlock ones.
Good science reporting is getting harder and harder to find in the mainstream media. Newspapers, falling on hard times, have cut back on science and investigative reporting.
Many now simply rely on syndicated `feeds’ for science news. Which means that hundreds of newspapers are simply reprinting the same `take’ on a story.
All of which increases the need to seek out more than one source, and more than one opinion, on something as important as pandemic influenza.
