One year ago at Tufts, single dormitory rooms were filled with quarantined students, bathroom walls were covered with posters warning against the ill effects of skipping a hand wash and a walk through campus wasn't complete without at least one swine flu mask spotting. This year, the tumult over the H1N1 virus, commonly known as the swine flu, seems to have died down considerably, if not completely.
Health professionals, however, warn that more relaxed attitudes toward the flu should not dissuade people from getting vaccinated. While the frenzy and paranoia surrounding swine flu have faded, the potential to get the flu — whether H1N1 or a different strand — has not.
"We do expect to see H1N1 flu this year," Dr. Margaret Higham, medical director of Health Service, said. "It's now going to be considered one of the seasonal flues."
So if the threat of swine flu has not decreased, why has the anxiety surrounding the virus vanished?
According to Higham, it's because people have already lived through the swine flu experience once before.
"The reason it has simmered out is that we have the experience of what it was like last year," she said. "When a new strain develops, you don't know what it's going to be like. You don't know how serious it's going to be. You don't know how many people it's going to make ill."
Now that a year has gone by, it is possible to see how the H1N1 strain was not worse than the strains that emerged in other years; it was simply more prevalent, Higham said.
"We saw that a lot of people got the flu, particularly younger people. Much more were hit with the flu last year than in the regular flu season," she said. "However, the flu itself, although it was miserable, was no worse than the regular flu. It did seem worse particularly for babies and pregnant women, but for the general population … it wasn't drastically worse than the regular flu."
Higham explained, however, that the hysteria surrounding swine flu last year was not necessarily unfounded — or an effect of media hype, to which many attributed it.
"I don't think it's the media's fault. I think the media was responding to very real medical fears," Higham said. "I'm trained in infectious diseases, and I know what the range of new flus has been like over the past couple of centuries, and some have been extremely serious, and others have been very mild, and you just don't know until the situation unfolds what you're dealing with. I think that the amount of attention that was paid to it was appropriate. We just didn't know what to expect."
Other strains of the flu are also detrimental, though, Steven Cohen, assistant professor of public health & community medicine at the Tufts School of Medicine, reminded, pointing out that before H1N1, students suffered considerably from the "regular" seasonal flu.
"I would be more concerned with flu in general this year," he said.
Higham agreed, advising students to vaccinate, regardless of what type of strain may appear.
"I strongly recommend that students be vaccinated. We did 900 shots last Tuesday in the pouring rain and nobody waited in line for five minutes. We can get 400 shots per hour — we've really got it down to a fine science," she said. "It's so much better to have that one shot than to have to worry about missing that week of finals exams because you have the flu," she said.
While the lack of flu panic has provided many students with a disincentive to line up for shots at Health Service, some students, including senior Justin Mitchell, are not taking any risks.
Mitchell, a singer and songwriter, has not forgotten that any strain of flu has the potential to turn students into dormitory prisoners and keep them from schoolwork and other activities.
"If I get sick, I can't sing, perform, workout or do school," he said.
Cohen remarked that it may be too early to tell how far the effects of the H1N1 strand will reach this year, but like Higham, he is sure that it will reappear to some degree.
"It may not come back as much as it was last year at this time, but I think it will be something that will still be around, at least as a component of the flu. … Only time will tell unfortunately," he said.
