New statistics show that a high number of people who have been hospitalized for swine flu are also obese.
According the Journal of the American Medical Association, roughly 25 percent of patients hospitalized for the H1N1 virus in California through mid-August were obese. Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says the numbers make sense, since many obese people are already in a condition to be at high risk for other diseases.
Further research showed that two-thirds of the obese patients had a health problem already recognized as a risk factor for swine flu – such as chronic lung disease and heart disease.
Dr. David Heber, director of the Risk Factor Obesity Program at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, pointed out that obese people tend to have weaker immune systems than people of normal weight. People who are obese, some scientists say, have a level of inflammation in their bodies that makes it hard to ward off disease. Video plays below.
