PITTSBURGH -- What is H1N1? When will a vaccine be available in your area? Should you get it?
All this week Channel 4 Action News has been reporting on ways to help you and your family learn more about the H1N1 flu.
Along with educating the public, health officials are turning to technology to help them fight the flu. A supercomputer in Pittsburgh is mapping the disease in hopes of helping control it.
"So what we're looking at here is a visualization of one of our computer simulations, simulating a pandemic influenza going through Allegheny County," said Shawn Brown of Pittsburgh Supercomputing.
Working with experts at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center began setting up the advanced program around the time the H1N1 flu hit this spring.
For years the group has been working on a way to look at a pandemic and how various prevention measures would impact it.
H1N1 is the first pandemic since 1918, and represents the first time this program is in full use.
"We can build experiments in the computer that you can't do in real life. We can build a population and infect them with the flu. And then look at different mitigation strategies like vaccinations or anti-virals or social distancing and see how that affects the disease spread," Brown said.
Brown's model shows about 20 percent of the 1.2 million residents in Allegheny County being infected with H1N1 within 200 days if no preventative measures are taken.
With the possibility of the fast spread of H1N1, and the danger it poses to children, Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC is taking steps to prepare.
For the first time, the hospital has set up an overflow clinic to handle extra patients and people coming in with symptoms will be asked to wear a mask.
Dr. Michael Green said people coming into the hospital will be asked questions about fever or respiratory problems and then offered the mask.
The computer program can illustrate how measures like vaccinations, closing schools and using drugs like Tamiflu will impact the spread of H1N1.
Programmers are sharing this information with local government leaders and the Health Department in hopes of improving control of the disease.
"Of all the work I've done in the supercomputing center, and I've done a lot of different things, this is certainly one that's had the most social benefit," Brown said.
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