Talk:Influenza

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Influenza is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.

This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on January 1, 2007.

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Date	Process	Result
October 20, 2006	Good article nominee	Listed
October 23, 2006	Peer review	Reviewed
November 2, 2006	Featured article candidate	Promoted

Current status: Featured article

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Ideal sources for Wikipedia's health content are defined in the guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) and are typically review articles. Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about Influenza.

PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles)
The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine.
Other potential sources include: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and CDC

This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

Fatality rate numbers[edit]

Are the fatality rate numbers correct? See here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_talk:InfluenzaCaseMortality.svg .

Virology[edit]

I don't think much of the content under "Virology" is relevant for an article about the disease caused by the virus. "Types of virus" is fine (it provides context for the cause of the disease) but everything else seems better suited for articles on the actual viruses themselves. These subsections are also extremely technical so even if they are relevant to this article they should be rewritten for clarity. C. A. Struck (talk) 21:47, 7 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Etymology section[edit]

I noticed the etymology section is unusually placed near the end of the article instead of as usual in any article immediately after the lead. Sincerely, --Thinker78 (talk) 21:02, 31 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Abbreviations[edit]

I see there are some edits regarding these. I think we should spell out the viruses' names because no one (virologist) uses them. Unlike HAV for hepatitis A virus and HCV for hepatitis C virus most sources, and I have two books open in front of me, say influenza A virus and so forth. (Some sources reduce this to just influenza A but this is really the name of the disease and not the virus). Graham Beards (talk) 13:41, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at the literature on the topic, it does appear that the abbreviations are fairly commonly used - eg Journal of Virology, Current Opinion in Virology, etc. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:09, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I see, thanks. But those are just the author's choice rather than standard, accepted abbreviations. This list of accepted abbreviations only has a couple of viruses on it and one is HIV: [1]. Abbreviating viruses' names stems from the days of paper journals and manual typewriters, to save space and time. I quickly checked the Manuals of Style for Virology (journal) and The Journal of Virology, but there was no guidance on this. I think for our, mainly lay, readers it is best to spell the names out in this article. Graham Beards (talk) 10:10, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think it would be better to restore the previous version - it's pretty standard to introduce the full phrase at first appearance and abbreviate thereafter. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:10, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree. They have enough to take in with H1N2, H2N3, H3N2 and so on, which stand for haemagglutinin and neuraminidase. The article will be riddled with abbreviations. Graham Beards (talk) 06:32, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not at all. There isn't a requirement that these be the only abbreviations used, and the article was accessible (and less wordy) in the previous version. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:54, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Two editors disagree with you. Graham Beards (talk) 05:19, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]