Common flu not cool enough?

In this week’s issue of The Uniter, I wrote an article examining the H1N1 situation at the University of Winnipeg so far this year. Basically, we were pretty lucky. We certainly did not get hit as badly as some anticipated.

As Martin Grainger, the emergency preparedness co-ordinator said, though there were students calling in sick, it wasn’t an abnormal number. Sure, the fall term had its share of absent students, but who knows if it was simply due to the seasonal flu or it there were some cases of H1N1.

Initially, I wasn’t surprised to hear this news. I expected that this whole H1N1 scare would be a little anti-climactic, especially given the incessant fear-mongering of the media.

However, after reading an article in the Journal Sentinel that Mr. Grainger sent to me this week about sick university students in Wisconsin, I’ve come to appreciate just how lucky we here at the U of W have been. Judging by this article, things could have been a lot worse.

According to the article, 200 students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were treated with “flu-like symptoms” in their first week back on campus. This number doubled to a whopping 400 who were treated the second week.

The article also says that according to the American College Health Association, roughly 165 college students in the U.S. were hospitalized due to “flu-like symptoms” and three students died.

However, the article does not explicitly state that these hospitalized students had confirmed cases of H1N1. That made me wonder if people just attributing all symptoms that fall under that broad category of “flu-like” to H1N1?

It doesn’t really seem that students are incredibly terrified of contracting the virus. The article says that once the vaccine was made available to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, a mere 3,100 vaccinations were distributed to students. This is seemingly insignificant considering the UWM has a student body of 29,000.

So, I guess what I am still wondering after receiving all this information is: what the hell is really going on? Is H1N1 really the cause of all the sick university students in the States?

Or is it simply that the seasonal flu just isn’t as impressive of an illness to become infected with anymore?