Is swine flu as deadly as we thought?

What is the significance of the first person-to-person transmission of the H1N1 virus?This is the point at which the virus could, theoretically, start to spread exponentially through the population. But it has been taken into account already by officials; because the new H1N1 virus has already jumped the species barrier into humans, scientists knew the bug would become transmissible between humans at some stage.Dr Mark Fielder, a medical microbiologist at Kingston University, says it should not be a major cause for concern. "It's a fairly mild disease really. Its ability to spread between people, while there, is not enormous."He adds that maintaining good standards of hygiene and following the Health Protection Agency's advice about regular handwashing and sneezing into tissues would halt the ability of the virus to spread quickly."The one thing to recognise is that we haven't had that many deaths yet. We've had far more deaths from...

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