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Thursday, April 15, 2010

Reuters : Swine flu can damage kidneys, doctors find

Via Reuters:

" Patients who became severely ill with H1N1 swine flu last year often developed kidney failure, which worsened their illness and raised costs, Canadian researchers reported on Wednesday.

Doctors should be on the lookout for kidney damage in patients who are hospitalized with the virus, they told a meeting of the National Kidney Foundation.

"It's concerning that so many people got some form of kidney injury, although it was reversible in the majority of them," Dr. Manish Sood of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg said in a statement.

Sood's team looked at the cases of 47 critically ill patients with confirmed H1N1 infections who were admitted to one of seven intensive care units in Manitoba, a Western Canadian province.

Two-thirds had kidney injury or kidney failure. Eleven percent of them needed dialysis and 16 percent died."Patients who come to the ICU (intensive care unit) with critical illness who also have kidney injury stay longer, take up more resources and have a much higher chance of dying."

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