@roger,
roger wrote:
Well, fan me with a blowtorch. It's all there, so now it's only almost incredible.
Stands to reason, though, so I'm not sure why you found it hard to believe. Left to their own devices the obese will continue eating, so they have to be placed in a coma until the antibiotics can do their work. This been known since the very start of the epidemic:
Quote:...Fat cells secrete chemicals that cause chronic, low-level inflammation that can hamper the body’s immune response and narrow the airways, says Tim Armstrong, a doctor working in the WHO’s chronic diseases department in Geneva...What’s more, excess fatty tissue compresses the chest, and the fatty infiltration of the chest wall causes a decrease in lung function and an increase in the pulmonary blood volume..... “If you are obese, you tend to be less physically active and have an associated shallower breathing pattern. All these compound, leading to breathing difficulties.”....The morbidly obese are also more likely to experience insulin resistance, a condition that makes it harder for doctors to lower the level of sugar in the blood of critically ill patients...
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601202&sid=aM.7Dg3Z_msI
In poor countries these people are just plain left to die, and we may get there too if we really get as many cases as predicted >
Quote:The first two people to die from the bug in Peru -- a 38- year-old woman and a 4-year-old girl from impoverished areas on the outskirts of Lima -- were both obese ...
> triage rules are to leave out the very fat (they'll probably die anyway) and the very thin (they'll probably make it on their own anyway) and to only admit the in-between patients, ie those to whom intensive care is likely to make a difference.
