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      The Severity of Pandemic H1N1 Influenza in the United States, from April to July 2009: A Bayesian Analysis

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          Abstract

          Marc Lipsitch and colleagues use complementary data from two US cities, Milwaukee and New York City, to assess the severity of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza in the United States.

          Abstract

          Background

          Accurate measures of the severity of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza (pH1N1) are needed to assess the likely impact of an anticipated resurgence in the autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. Severity has been difficult to measure because jurisdictions with large numbers of deaths and other severe outcomes have had too many cases to assess the total number with confidence. Also, detection of severe cases may be more likely, resulting in overestimation of the severity of an average case. We sought to estimate the probabilities that symptomatic infection would lead to hospitalization, ICU admission, and death by combining data from multiple sources.

          Methods and Findings

          We used complementary data from two US cities: Milwaukee attempted to identify cases of medically attended infection whether or not they required hospitalization, while New York City focused on the identification of hospitalizations, intensive care admission or mechanical ventilation (hereafter, ICU), and deaths. New York data were used to estimate numerators for ICU and death, and two sources of data—medically attended cases in Milwaukee or self-reported influenza-like illness (ILI) in New York—were used to estimate ratios of symptomatic cases to hospitalizations. Combining these data with estimates of the fraction detected for each level of severity, we estimated the proportion of symptomatic patients who died (symptomatic case-fatality ratio, sCFR), required ICU (sCIR), and required hospitalization (sCHR), overall and by age category. Evidence, prior information, and associated uncertainty were analyzed in a Bayesian evidence synthesis framework. Using medically attended cases and estimates of the proportion of symptomatic cases medically attended, we estimated an sCFR of 0.048% (95% credible interval [CI] 0.026%–0.096%), sCIR of 0.239% (0.134%–0.458%), and sCHR of 1.44% (0.83%–2.64%). Using self-reported ILI, we obtained estimates approximately 7–9× lower. sCFR and sCIR appear to be highest in persons aged 18 y and older, and lowest in children aged 5–17 y. sCHR appears to be lowest in persons aged 5–17; our data were too sparse to allow us to determine the group in which it was the highest.

          Conclusions

          These estimates suggest that an autumn–winter pandemic wave of pH1N1 with comparable severity per case could lead to a number of deaths in the range from considerably below that associated with seasonal influenza to slightly higher, but with the greatest impact in children aged 0–4 and adults 18–64. These estimates of impact depend on assumptions about total incidence of infection and would be larger if incidence of symptomatic infection were higher or shifted toward adults, if viral virulence increased, or if suboptimal treatment resulted from stress on the health care system; numbers would decrease if the total proportion of the population symptomatically infected were lower than assumed.

          Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary

          Editors' Summary

          Background

          Every winter, millions of people catch influenza—a viral infection of the airways—and about half a million people die as a result. In the US alone, an average of 36,000 people are thought to die from influenza-related causes every year. These seasonal epidemics occur because small but frequent changes in the virus mean that an immune response produced one year provides only partial protection against influenza the next year. Occasionally, influenza viruses emerge that are very different and to which human populations have virtually no immunity. These viruses can start global epidemics (pandemics) that kill millions of people. Experts have been warning for some time that an influenza pandemic is long overdue and in, March 2009, the first cases of influenza caused by a new virus called pandemic (H1N1) 2009 (pH1N1; swine flu) occurred in Mexico. The virus spread rapidly and on 11 June 2009, the World Health Organization declared that a global pandemic of pH1N1 influenza was underway. By the beginning of November 2009, more than 6,000 people had died from pH1N1 influenza.

          Why Was This Study Done?

          With the onset of autumn—drier weather and the return of children to school help the influenza virus to spread—pH1N1 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the Northern Hemisphere have greatly increased. Although public-health officials have been preparing for this resurgence of infection, they cannot be sure of its impact on human health without knowing more about the severity of pH1N1 infections. The severity of an infection can be expressed as a case-fatality ratio (CFR; the proportion of cases that result in death), as a case-hospitalization ratio (CHR; the proportion of cases that result in hospitalization), and as a case-intensive care ratio (CIR; the proportion of cases that require treatment in an intensive care unit). Because so many people have been infected with pH1N1 since it emerged, the numbers of cases and deaths caused by pH1N1 infection are not known accurately so these ratios cannot be easily calculated. In this study, the researchers estimate the severity of pH1N1 influenza in the US between April and July 2009 by combining data on pH1N1 infections from several sources using a statistical approach known as Bayesian evidence synthesis.

          What Did the Researchers Do and Find?

          By using data on medically attended and hospitalized cases of pH1N1 infection in Milwaukee and information from New York City on hospitalizations, intensive care use, and deaths, the researchers estimate that the proportion of US cases with symptoms that died (the sCFR) during summer 2009 was 0.048%. That is, about 1 in 2,000 people who had symptoms of pH1N1 infection died. The “credible interval” for this sCFR, the range of values between which the “true” sCFR is likely to lie, they report, is 0.026%–0.096% (between 1 in 4,000 and 1 in 1,000 deaths for every symptomatic case). About 1 in 400 symptomatic cases required treatment in intensive care, they estimate, and about 1 in 70 symptomatic cases required hospital admission. When the researchers used a different approach to estimate the total number of symptomatic cases—based on New Yorkers' self-reported incidence of influenza-like-illness from a telephone survey—their estimates of pH1N1 infection severity were 7- to 9-fold lower. Finally, they report that the sCFR and the sCIR were highest in people aged 18 or older and lowest in children aged 5–17 years.

          What Do These Findings Mean?

          Many uncertainties (for example, imperfect detection and reporting) can affect estimates of influenza severity. Even so, the findings of this study suggest that an autumn–winter pandemic wave of pH1N1 will have a death toll only slightly higher than or considerably lower than that caused by seasonal influenza in an average year, provided pH1N1 continues to behave as it did during the summer. Similarly, the estimated burden on hospitals and intensive care facilities ranges from somewhat higher than in a normal influenza season to considerably lower. The findings of this study also suggest that, unlike seasonal influenza, which kills mainly elderly adults, a high proportion of deaths from pH1N1infection will occur in nonelderly adults, a shift in age distribution that has been seen in previous pandemics. With these estimates in hand and with continued close monitoring of the pandemic, public-health officials should now be in a better position to plan effective strategies to deal with the pH1N1 pandemic.

          Additional Information

          Please access these Web sites via the online version of this summary at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000207.

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          Most cited references35

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          Transmissibility of 1918 pandemic influenza

          The 1918 influenza pandemic killed 20–40 million people worldwide 1 , and is seen as a worst-case scenario for pandemic planning. Like other pandemic influenza strains, the 1918 A/H1N1 strain spread extremely rapidly. A measure of transmissibility and of the stringency of control measures required to stop an epidemic is the reproductive number, which is the number of secondary cases produced by each primary case 2 . Here we obtained an estimate of the reproductive number for 1918 influenza by fitting a deterministic SEIR (susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered) model to pneumonia and influenza death epidemic curves from 45 US cities: the median value is less than three. The estimated proportion of the population with A/H1N1 immunity before September 1918 implies a median basic reproductive number of less than four. These results strongly suggest that the reproductive number for 1918 pandemic influenza is not large relative to many other infectious diseases 2 . In theory, a similar novel influenza subtype could be controlled. But because influenza is frequently transmitted before a specific diagnosis is possible and there is a dearth of global antiviral and vaccine stores, aggressive transmission reducing measures will probably be required. Supplementary information The online version of this article (doi:10.1038/nature03063) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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            Modeling targeted layered containment of an influenza pandemic in the United States.

            Planning a response to an outbreak of a pandemic strain of influenza is a high public health priority. Three research groups using different individual-based, stochastic simulation models have examined the consequences of intervention strategies chosen in consultation with U.S. public health workers. The first goal is to simulate the effectiveness of a set of potentially feasible intervention strategies. Combinations called targeted layered containment (TLC) of influenza antiviral treatment and prophylaxis and nonpharmaceutical interventions of quarantine, isolation, school closure, community social distancing, and workplace social distancing are considered. The second goal is to examine the robustness of the results to model assumptions. The comparisons focus on a pandemic outbreak in a population similar to that of Chicago, with approximately 8.6 million people. The simulations suggest that at the expected transmissibility of a pandemic strain, timely implementation of a combination of targeted household antiviral prophylaxis, and social distancing measures could substantially lower the illness attack rate before a highly efficacious vaccine could become available. Timely initiation of measures and school closure play important roles. Because of the current lack of data on which to base such models, further field research is recommended to learn more about the sources of transmission and the effectiveness of social distancing measures in reducing influenza transmission.
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              Pandemic versus epidemic influenza mortality: a pattern of changing age distribution.

              Almost all deaths related to current influenza epidemics occur among the elderly. However, mortality was greatest among the young during the 1918-1919 pandemic. This study compared the age distribution of influenza-related deaths in the United States during this century's three influenza A pandemics with that of the following epidemics. Half of influenza-related deaths during the 1968-1969 influenza A (H3N2) pandemic and large proportions of influenza-related deaths during the 1957-1958 influenza A (H2N2) and the 1918-1919 influenza A (H1N1) pandemics occurred among persons <65 years old. However, this group accounted for decrementally smaller proportions of deaths during the first decade following each pandemic. A model suggested that this mortality pattern may be explained by selective acquisition of protection against fatal illness among younger persons. The large proportion of influenza-related deaths during each pandemic and the following decade among persons <65 years old should be considered in planning for pandemics.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Academic Editor
                Journal
                PLoS Med
                PLoS
                plosmed
                PLoS Medicine
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1549-1277
                1549-1676
                December 2009
                December 2009
                8 December 2009
                : 6
                : 12
                : e1000207
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom
                [2 ]Statistics, Modelling and Bioinformatics Department, Health Protection Agency Centre for Infections, London, United Kingdom
                [3 ]Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, City of New York, New York, New York, United States of America
                [4 ]Department of Health, City of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States of America
                [5 ]Influenza Division, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
                [6 ]Department of Community Medicine and School of Public Health, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
                [7 ]Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Departments of Epidemiology and Immunology & Infectious Diseases, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
                George Washington University, United States of America
                Author notes

                ICMJE criteria for authorship read and met: AMP DDA TNYCSFIT AH CR SR BSC LF PB ML. Agree with the manuscript's results and conclusions: AMP DDA TNYCSFIT AH CR SR BSC LF PB ML. Designed the experiments/the study: TNYCSFIT SR BSC LF ML. Analyzed the data: AMP LF ML. Collected data/did experiments for the study: TNYCSFIT AH LF PB. Enrolled patients: TNYCSFIT AH. Wrote the first draft of the paper: ML. Contributed to the writing of the paper: AMP DDA TNYCSFIT AH CR SR BSC LF PB. Contributed to model development: AMP. Contributed to model development and assessment: DDA. The New York City Swine Flu Investigation Team, who designed the surveillance for NYC, collected, cleaned, and did initial analyses of the data, is responsible for the data integrity of the NYC data and shared it with the other authors, and played a significant role in revising the paper and thinking through the analyses.

                ¶ Membership of The New York City Swine Flu Investigation Team is provided in the Acknowledgments.

                Article
                09-PLME-RA-2653R2
                10.1371/journal.pmed.1000207
                2784967
                19997612
                d68725c5-60bb-4648-a08b-094962c00f68
                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain declaration which stipulates that, once placed in the public domain, this work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose.
                History
                : 17 September 2009
                : 19 November 2009
                Page count
                Pages: 12
                Categories
                Research Article
                Infectious Diseases/Viral Infections
                Public Health and Epidemiology/Infectious Diseases

                Medicine
                Medicine

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