Swine Flu Tools Update for Grandparents and Senior Home Care Givers

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Swine Flu. It hasn’t gone nuclear the way they thought it might. It also hasn’t disappeared from the landscape the way we all hoped it would! For Sandwich Generation caregivers dealing with both senior home care for our aging parents and helping with our younger grandkids, particularly any with special needs, it’s definitely something we need to keep our eyes on! For today’s Current Events for Caregivers and Grandparents, I thought it was a good time for an update on informative sites available as tools for caregivers. These are all in addition to my original article, SandwichINK’s Microblog Monday – Swine Flu.

NHSDirect is based in England and has an interesting Swine Flu symptom checker. As they will tell you on their site, if you think you or one of your family members might have the swine flu, it’s best to check with your own doctor as soon as possible. If you absolutely can’t or won’t, at least not right away, this could be a very useful tool. Just be aware that if they tell you to call 999, you would need to call 911 immediately. Unless, of course, you are testing the system as I was.  🙂  You’ll be happy to hear that my scratchy throat passed with flying colors, although the traveling gentleman I saw last week definitely needed to call his doctor ASAP!

CDC continues to be a good informational site with a U.S. H1N1 Flu Situation Update map, showing weekly flu activity estimates. As you may know, the CDC announced that “on June 11, 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) signaled that a global pandemic of novel influenza A (H1N1) was underway by raising the worldwide pandemic alert level to Phase 6.” This was due to how much the flu has spread, NOT to how severe the flu is. Per the CDC, “Since the WHO declaration of a pandemic, the new H1N1 virus has continued to spread, with the number of countries reporting cases of novel H1N1 nearly doubling.” According to their site, there have been 211 deaths and 37,246 cases with California, New York, and Texas having the most deaths. Interestingly Illinois, Wisconsin and Texas are the states with the most cases. If you or your family member are concerned about the illness, their swine flu update has several good links for more information.

Our government has created an interesting site. Flu.gov has updates, information, and even a free educational health video we can share with our grandchildren! This could be a good addition to their various homeschooling programs and free is always one of my favorite ways to save money. 🙂  You can also sign up for Twitter, Facebook and/or email updates from them. Watch out on the email sign up – be sure you watch closely so that you get only the emails you want and not 50 others you don’t want. 🙂

There is definitely lots of great info online for all of us involved with senior home care and grandkids. Hopefully, we will never need it, but it’s a blessing to have the info bookmarked ahead of time. If you have other useful sites, please leave a note in the comments below. 🙂

For more Current Events News, visit Julie at The Surrendered Scribe.