Influenza - or flu, as we know it - is an infectious disease that affects birds and mammals. The seasonal flu that comes around every winter leaves you feeling ill for up to a week if you're unlucky enough to get it; but it's unlikely you'll experience any complications unless you have certain underlying medical conditions.
However, because flu is a virus, antibiotics don't affect it and so in the past we've simply had to let it run its course. One of the issues is that the flu virus mutates, so every few decades a new strain emerges that we have little resistance to. This enables it to spread rapidly across the world via coughs and sneezes, creating a pandemic which can occur at any time of year. There's nothing unusual about this, surprisingly - pandemics are in fact a natural event. Last century we had major ones in 1918, 1957 and 1968 in which millions of people died due to lack of immunity.
Swine flu (A/H1N1) is a recent mutation of the virus and is thought to have originated in pigs, although this isn't known for certain. First identified in Mexico in April 2009 the strain quickly became a pandemic, but so far it has proved milder than the seasonal flu we're used to even though it appears to attack the lungs more than usual.
Unlike bird flu (A/H5N1), the last mutated strain that was in the news back in 1997, swine flu does spread very easily from person to person. And we do need to be careful. While only a few hundred people worldwide have currently died from swine flu, the history of flu pandemics shows that the virus circulating can become stronger and more widespread in the winter months, just as our ordinary seasonal flu does in other years. That means we need to be as vigilant as we can about our hygiene to help slow its progress.
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