It's too soon to say if the swine flu pandemic is over, but health experts have begun to look back and survey the damage. One of the lessons from the pandemic is that pregnant women are at particularly high risk for severe complications, as is described in Monday's Los Angeles Times story, "A family left behind by the H1N1 virus." It's a story about the death of Virginia Romo, who was pregnant with her sixth child. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn't conducted its own review of the pandemic. But an editorial published in the Jan. 14 issue of the journal Nature makes the first of what are sure to be several summaries of the lessons learned from the swine flu. According to the Nature piece, the positive outcomes of the pandemic were that health researchers worldwide freely shared and published data on all aspects of the virus and its transmission. Also, most international health agencies reacted swiftly and communicated openly with the media and the public. Health officials in Mexico, in particular, "deserve credit" for alerting the world to the first outbreaks there. The news media and bloggers responded well by not sensationalizing the threat and by debunking misinformation (such as the idea that the H1N1 vaccine would be mysterious and dangerous). On the downside, they noted, officials made predictions that the vaccine would be readily available for those who needed it the most last fall — and that did n…[...]

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Lessons from the swine flu pandemic