Recent pandemic influenza and it’s published articles distribution in the world

Abstract

Sir,

• At the beginning of the 21^st century, the third millennium, the pandemic flu A (H1N1) occurred. Between mid March and mid April 2009, a pandemic influenza A virus emerged in Mexico.^[1] The disease spread very quickly in different parts of the world. It has to be said that the disease infected millions of population in different continents and killed at least 18449 people,^[2] but less than the previous pandemic flu in 1918 (Table 1). Perhaps it was due to quick medical and nursing care. The disease appeared more severe in Mexico than in other countries perhaps as a result of genetic susceptibility, low immunity of individual, and epidemiological and health care availability for preventing the disease.^[3,4] Data were collected using an online survey of PubMed as the main database of medical literature only one year after that pandemic finished. Many articles have been published by researchers and were indexed. Based on my survey, only 3424 papers were published and indexed in PubMed on H1N1 by first of June 2011 compared to Spanish flu which occurred in 1918-1919 which showed only 149 papers indexed in PubMed.^[5] The researchers from America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa have published 605, 376, 374, 219, and 25 papers regarding H1N1, respectively. The other articles do not mention those areas. It should be added that only 213 out of 3424 papers were related to the source of pandemic flu in the Mexico City flu infection in the April 2009, as shown in table 1. The number of articles may also be correlated with the number of mortality rate. Africa with 0.91 mortality rate had the lowest published papers, instead the America region and the Euro region with 44.2 and 26.4 mortality rates had highest with 605 and 376 published papers. In Asia and EMRO region, with total 16.3% of death-related pandemic, there have been 374 published papers so far. This survey indicates that production of knowledge in EMRO has increased sharply with consideration of recent pandemic flu published papers. This survey also indicates that nursing articles related to pandemic flu are well published too.