Outcome of influenza

In this month's Thorax we publish two papers on outcomes of influenza. In the first paper, Fajardo-Dolci and colleagues report on clinical characteristics of 100 consecutive fatalities due to influenza A (H1N1) virus in Mexico which is regarded as the source of the recent pandemic. They discuss the disproportionate number of young adults who died due to H1N1 infection early in the outbreak and show that these patients had a high frequency of one or more chronic diseases on admission. In the accompanying editorial Dunning and Openshaw discuss the paper and point out that in Mexico access to anti-viral drugs was poor and fatalities were associated with high use of oral steroids. …