I have been spending most of my time of late kicking blogger. For some reason it decides to mess up every time I try to post something. This time I hope that it works.
Something else that I have been doing lately is trying to dodge sick kids. I guess it is part of the dangers of working at elementary and jr. high schools. The kids still (for the most part) love coming to school, no matter how they feel. They bring their germs and viruses and spread them to their classmates. Those go down the chain and end up spreading to the teachers and though educational offices and around families and back to the kids. A terrible cycle really, but that is nature at its most efficient and that deserves a little respect (if not fear).
So, in the end, one kid gets sick and that spreads to a lot of people in the school and that leads to the bigger spread of the sickness around the area. In order to battle the spread of these diseases (the major example lately being the H1N1 virus that produces the newest version of the flu) the Japanese close down classes, or sometimes whole schools, when a certain amount of the students get sick. Is this a new thing? Is this just a Japanese thing? I don't ever remember being sent home from school (and told not to come back to school for a week) because my classmates are sick. Does this happen in other countries?
I can't speak for all of Japan, but I can tell you about the rules for closing down a class or a school in the city in which I teach. 10% is the cut off. if 10% of the students in a certain class get sick than the class is shut down for the week. The same goes for grades. If 10% of the 3rd graders get sick, they all must stay away from school for the week. And, lastly, the same goes for the entire school. If 10% of the whole school gets sick no one goes to the school for the week. Also, the whole school is probably sprayed down with disinfectants and cleaned.
So many school are being closed lately that it is starting to make the news. You can see the original article here. In the week from the 18th to the 24th of this month 13,964 schools were effected by either school, grade or class closings. 784 schools were closes completely while 3,104 schools had grade closings and 10,076 had class closings. 9 prefectures even have more than 500 schools being effected by closings.
That is a whole lot of schools being effected. How does this compare to closings in the past? Well, It is 1.6 times the closings of the week before. On top of that, the peak of the normal winter influenza season last year resulted in 4105 schools being effected by closings. That is just 1/3 of what we are experiencing now. It looks like a run away infection event. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare even made a comment saying that it looks like the virus is really spreading fast in urban environments.
All in all I think that The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has a good point. Japan has a lot of people crammed into a small space. There is no better environment in which to spread diseases. It is a good idea to close schools and they should really think about closing businesses and everything that is unnecessary if (when) the spread of the virus heightens. If you can stop the virus's spread it will go a long way to help control the virus.
Any way, it is now time for the word of the day. Today's word is ウイルス(ういるす). It is pronounced uirusu and means virus. I sure hope that none of the kids that I teach today have any influenza viruses.
See you next time at JJNN
Showing posts with label influenza. Show all posts
Showing posts with label influenza. Show all posts
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
JJNN: Influenza
Welcome again to JJNN for February 25th, 2009. Today I will be talking about influenza.
During this time of the year "influenza" is almost like a dirty word. No one ever wants to deal with getting influenza. Of course the easiest way to avoid getting influenza is to avoid anyone that even looks the least bit sick. Well, things like getting a flu shot and taking care of your self works as well, but who wants to go to all that work?
It turns out the Japanese National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) is really worried about a new type of foreign strain of influenza virus making it's way into Japan. They set up models to to see how a new type of flu virus will spread in Tokyo and the areas around Tokyo if just one office worker brings back the virus from a foreign country. It is actually interesting how they came up with the model. It seems they took a sampling of 34,000,000 people that live in Tokyo and in all the prefectures that surround Tokyo. They tracked how these people get from place to place as well as where these people were during the day. From this data they were able to tell who would come into contact with who. In other words they can tell how many people come into contact with the person that is sick. If you assume that most of the people that come into contact with the virus will get sick (this is a good assumption because the Japanese people do not have antibodies for the new type of flu) than you can figure out how many people will get sick. Now here is the fun part. You have to take all those people and figure out how many people they meet and do the same thing as you did with the first person. As you can see, the numbers of people that get sick gets big real fast. This would be the start of an epidemic.
NIID ran many different simulations on their model to find the best way to reduce the number of people that might come down with the new flu virus. They found the best way deal with the problem was to make sure people don't walk around spreading the disease. The results are amazing. If no actions are taken 51.6% of all the people around Tokyo could come down with the flu. If all the schools (from pre-school to university) are closed down this only drops to 47.4%. That is not a very big drop. If all the schools are closed and 40% of the people that would normal go to work would stay home the number of people that will get sick goes down to 19.1%. And if the number of people staying home from work rises to 60% the number of that would get sick goes down to a nice 9.5%. It is worth mentioning that around 9% is the infection rate for the flu virus on a normal year in Japan. That is a lot of numbers but here it what it would look like visually.
During this time of the year "influenza" is almost like a dirty word. No one ever wants to deal with getting influenza. Of course the easiest way to avoid getting influenza is to avoid anyone that even looks the least bit sick. Well, things like getting a flu shot and taking care of your self works as well, but who wants to go to all that work?
It turns out the Japanese National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) is really worried about a new type of foreign strain of influenza virus making it's way into Japan. They set up models to to see how a new type of flu virus will spread in Tokyo and the areas around Tokyo if just one office worker brings back the virus from a foreign country. It is actually interesting how they came up with the model. It seems they took a sampling of 34,000,000 people that live in Tokyo and in all the prefectures that surround Tokyo. They tracked how these people get from place to place as well as where these people were during the day. From this data they were able to tell who would come into contact with who. In other words they can tell how many people come into contact with the person that is sick. If you assume that most of the people that come into contact with the virus will get sick (this is a good assumption because the Japanese people do not have antibodies for the new type of flu) than you can figure out how many people will get sick. Now here is the fun part. You have to take all those people and figure out how many people they meet and do the same thing as you did with the first person. As you can see, the numbers of people that get sick gets big real fast. This would be the start of an epidemic.
NIID ran many different simulations on their model to find the best way to reduce the number of people that might come down with the new flu virus. They found the best way deal with the problem was to make sure people don't walk around spreading the disease. The results are amazing. If no actions are taken 51.6% of all the people around Tokyo could come down with the flu. If all the schools (from pre-school to university) are closed down this only drops to 47.4%. That is not a very big drop. If all the schools are closed and 40% of the people that would normal go to work would stay home the number of people that will get sick goes down to 19.1%. And if the number of people staying home from work rises to 60% the number of that would get sick goes down to a nice 9.5%. It is worth mentioning that around 9% is the infection rate for the flu virus on a normal year in Japan. That is a lot of numbers but here it what it would look like visually.
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