Twizted Kitten, on Apr 26 2009, 01:31 PM, said:
Oh lord. This is exactly what I mean,
20 people contract a flu and the entire globe goes into a panic.
I'd be worried when close to a 10th of the population contracts it. I mean, it's just a modified strain of influenza. I bet of those people who died they either couldn't make it to a hospital or had a foot in the grave anyway.
Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it. History, in fact, has two lessons to teach us about the potential for disaster this viral outbreak represents:
1).
The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 - 1/3 of the US population contracted the Spanish Flu in 1918 and over half a million people died from it. Unlike the more common flu viruses, the primary cause of death with the Spanish Flu was something called a cytokine storm, a fatal immune system response to infection. Essentially, the stronger your immune system was, the more violent the reaction, and the more likely you were to die. Those of you who have read the news reports from Mexico may have noted that the primary vectors for the Swine Flu are young, healthy adults. This is very similar to the zero vectors of the Spanish Flu, which began in an Army barracks in Kansas. This and other similarities between the Spanish Flu and the Swine Flu have not been lost on the CDC.
2. The Federal Government's response to Hurricane Katrina - Despite numerous studies predicting the catastrophic damage a Category 3 or higher hurricane could do to New Orleans, despite National Weather Service forecasts of a direct hit by Hurricane Katrina over a week in advance, and despite the please of state and local officials, the Federal government took days to mount any sort of coordinated response to the destruction in New Orleans. According to
government and
private reports of this incident, the slow response to this disaster by government officials at every level was directly responsible for the level death and human suffering experienced in this disaster.
What conclusions can we draw from history? It is better to get out in front of a potential disaster and gain control of the situation before things go to hell in a handbasket. The alternative? Maybe a lot of officials look alarmist...and maybe we get live satellite images of bodies floating down the streets of an major American city.
You know the tern "better safe than sorry"? When you are talking about potentially millions of deaths, I think this is one adage it might pay to take to heart.
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I'm not saying it doesn't affect normally healthy people, but then again I don't believe there is one of us who hasn't come down with some kind of cold in our entire lives.
There is flu, and there is flu. It isn't simply one kind of virus. There are a wide variety of influenza viruses, specific to a number of species, all mutating and sometimes recombining to create new strains. This is why there are fresh vaccinations every season; the flu you avoided the previous year has turned into something else this year. The best they can do is work to keep
last year's flu from infecting you. Why do scientists and public policy officials worry about a flu pandemic? Because from year to year, no one knows when the influenza virus will mutate into a particularly deadly strain, as was the case in 1918.
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It's this kind of overprotection, like a kid allergic to peanuts, that is going to be our end. If we start freaking out over every single little virus that surfaces (which is bound to happen considering all the antibiotic-resistant viruses forming thanks to decades of overmedication) we're going to die of anxiety rather than the damned virus itself.
What over-protection? What we are seeing from the government is a sensible and measured response to the kind of thing that has been responsible for the deaths of millions in the not-to-distant past. Just like the danger posed by major hurricanes, it isn't as though anyone is making this up; people have died in the past as a result of things like this; and in the case of flu pandemics, they have died by the millions. Even if the government was responsible for starting a panic, that fear wouldn't be worse than the reality this country has already lived through.
Twizted Kitten, on Apr 26 2009, 05:37 PM, said:
In the article they go on to say how acute the cases in Canada were, then they go on to call it a "deadly virus". Seriously, shouldn't it just be regarded as a normal flu? Don't people die from normal influenza every day?
Why, after some 83 deaths in MEXICO do they decide that it's a DEADLY virus?
83 deaths out of 1,300 infections is a HORRIBLE rate of death. In an average year, 36,000 people in the US die as a result of complications from the influenza virus. If you applied the rate of death for the Swine Flu represented by that "83 out of 1,300" ratio to the US population, this would mean almost 17 MILLION deaths. And those 83 deaths occurred in a matter of
weeks, not over the course of a year.
And as I stated above, this is far from being a "normal" influenza virus.
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My God! The media is unbelievable!
I have to agree with you there. Thanks to a 24-hour news cycle, the constant repetition eventually goes well past informing and tears off into fanning the flames of hysteria. Even the few measures taken by the US government to date make it sound as though we have piles of bodies in the streets right now.
This is why I quite the newspaper I once worked for. Ethics and responsible journalism mean nothing in the face of competition and advertising revenue.
Bunch 'o fuckers.
- Heretic
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ZOMBIE PIGS!!! 
Bring out the Weapons of Mass Destruction and the ninjas! 
