Talk:Influenza

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Influenza is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.

This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on January 1, 2007.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
October 20, 2006	Good article nominee	Listed
October 23, 2006	Peer review	Reviewed
November 2, 2006	Featured article candidate	Promoted

Current status: Featured article

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Ideal sources for Wikipedia's health content are defined in the guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) and are typically review articles. Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about Influenza.

PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles)
The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine.
Other potential sources include: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and CDC

This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

Fatality rate numbers

Are the fatality rate numbers correct? See here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_talk:InfluenzaCaseMortality.svg .

WHO research streams

Hi @Nikkimaria, thanks for taking a look at my edits. You have taken out my elaboration of the WHO research streams as "overdetail". I would like to put them back. Without explanatory text they are just five sentences of waffle.

It is important to recognise that much of the research into prevention and control of disease is not just virology or pharmacology, which was the content prior to my edit. There are social aspects to controlling disease (as we discovered with COVID), prevention of zoonosis, research into predispositions and comorbitities, etc. Bob (talk) 07:46, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't that WHO report getting rather old? We are already seven years into the five to ten year plan. Also, I am skeptical that the Research sections in articles adds much encyclopedic value; they are often too speculative. Graham Beards (talk) 09:30, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Graham Beards, I agree with you one both counts - but that doesn't invalidate my edit.

Yes the research streams have been around for a while - so maybe they should have been included a long time ago. The streams are still valid and form a good framework for the research section. WHO have a poor record at keeping their own deadlines, I expect they will get round to updating eventually.

Agree that the "research" section is often non-encyclopedic, I suppose that's why it's usually tucked away at the bottom of an article. I took a look at a couple of the named drug candidates in the "treatment" paragraph - one has completed trials and is licenced, the other flopped. Neither qualify for inclusion any more. But it's good to have it if only as a place for inexperienced editors to drop in something they have come across.

A summary of research directions (priorities, themes, streams, whatever) seems appropriate and should be OK without revision for a few years.

Cheers, Bob (talk) 19:37, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To be honest this sounds like a better rationale for removing the section entirely than for expanding it - we shouldn't have a section sitting around just to act as a junk drawer for people to drop stuff in. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:05, 6 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you. Graham Beards (talk) 08:30, 6 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Misleading illustration

I would like to replace this illustration File:Influenza geneticshift.svg which appears in the section "Antigenic drift and shift". Reasons:

It is an inaccurate reproduction of the source ^[1]. The two "parents" are correctly labeled, but in the original the progeny is not given a description whereas the Wikimedia reproduction labels the progeny as "highly pathogenic human strain". Accompanying text in the original explains that a human strain may acquire characteristics from a highly pathogenic avian strain, but makes no assumption about the characteristics of the progeny.
This section contains no explanation of pathogenicity
The image only illustrates shift, not drift.

Here's a possible replacement File:Viruses-10-00497-g003.png

Bob (talk) 21:21, 16 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Yoo E (February 2014). "Conformation and Linkage Studies of Specific Oligosaccharides Related to H1N1, H5N1, and Human Flu for Developing the Second Tamiflu". Biomolecules & Therapeutics. 22 (2): 93–99. doi:10.4062/biomolther.2014.005. PMC 3975476. PMID 24753813.

Flu Crisis (kind of)

Will there be anything to address the current influenza crisis (possibly outbreak if you want to be a bit dramatic) that are currently thinning medical resources and declared as a critical incident (for some)?

Most of these reports are local to the United Kingdom albeit still relevant nonetheless and, in terms of global/international public health, trends have shown deviation from the standard; enough for it to present as an issue to some agencies.

Apologies if I sound exaggerated or melodramatic - I do understand the scale of these events arent bad and will most certainly be forgotten. Rouxoo (talk) 20:25, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Viral fever" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Viral fever has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 January 14 § Viral fever until a consensus is reached. Anonymous 14:59, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

[:1-1] Yoo E (February 2014). "Conformation and Linkage Studies of Specific Oligosaccharides Related to H1N1, H5N1, and Human Flu for Developing the Second Tamiflu". Biomolecules & Therapeutics. 22 (2): 93–99. doi:10.4062/biomolther.2014.005. PMC 3975476. PMID 24753813.

[1]