Seriously... all of them. The article says they reacted the same way to bird flu but I don't see how that's even possible. I wonder how they'd react to an outbreak of chicken-pox, or worse yet... my wife's got a bad case of baby-fever. I think we'll be staying away from Egypt.
Wow.
Especially since health experts are saying you get this flu from humans and not pigs. That's one of the reasons it's suppose to be called the "H1N1" flu instead of the swine flu. Also, calling it the swine flu is offensive to Jews, Muslims, and Rose O'Donnell.
257 have died from the bird flu since 2003. None in the U.S. One toddler died in Houston from the "H1N1" flu, but that 23 month old was actually from Mexico. No U.S. citizens have died from this flu.
I'm only 23 years old and already have survived SARS, anthrax scares, the bird flu, and any other "pandemics" I had no knowledge of when I was young. I think I'll be able to fight off this "H1N1" scare.
MamaBear wrote:Uh, did he just say 1.5 billion dollars? Somebody please tell me I misheard that and he did not say we are going to spend 1.5 billion dollars on the f**king pig flu!!!!
The concern re: H1N1 is it has attributes that make it a threat to the entire population (not just the very young, sick and elderly) and it is not only transmitting human to human, but appears quite airborne... spreading quickly everywhere. I don't think the mortality rate is the big concern at this point - especially in the U.S. But people shouldn't confuse (intentionally or otherwise) this with the "normal flu" that every year picks off tens of thousands of people who are at risk anyway - this is a completely different problem, and can't be compared like that. The normal, annual flu bug is NEVER a risk to kill millions of people - this one certainly IS. That is the difference.
Like we know, viruses are always evolving, and it can be hard to keep up with them for the creation of vacines. So the real problem with this one is the known high-risk attributes combines with the unknown risk that they don't know how fast the virus mutates (evolves into a different & potentially badder something). If it becomes more deadly, quickly, and is airborne ... it could end up a Stephen King-class story.
I agree with you, mama, that the economy is JUST as big of a story (or should be), if not bigger. A global depression will kill and harm more people than all but the worst pandemics. U.S. GDP... another 6% down in Q1! Employment shedding 600K jobs/month in the US (higher on a % basis elsewhere)! Housing prices continue on the downward spiral, which will further destroy the financial industry. Things are getting worse, and the positive spin of companies just barely beating dramatically lowered earnings expectations (and some with the benefit of new bogus accounting standards)... is not sustainable.
2023 Chicago Bears... emerging from a long hibernation, and hungry!
There are lots of smart people here, so if this a duplicate post sorry. The flu isn't really the killer here, the killer is almost always an opportunistic infection by something else like bacteria once the flu has weakened your defenses.
There is actually a bacteria named influenzae which was called that because it was originally seen as the cause of the Spanish flu in 1917. Now they know that it was actually a secondary infection that really did the dirty work the flu virus started.
This is why we are probably okay here in the states, we have available help when we're sick. The secondary infection comes when your dehydrated and run down from the flu. When you are a 7 year old who sleeps with chickens, the chances of you getting medical attention when you are just starting to get sick are pretty slim on average.
It won't get to be a huge deal here I don't think, just keep hydrated and go to the doc if you get real sick and they'll give you an IV. The anti-virals only work pre-symptoms so they should really only give them to immediate family of people who've gotten sick but aren't already sick themselves.
Also the flu virus has an built in inhibitor that no one in the media ever really mentions. The infectiousness of the bug is adversely affected by it's ability to cause disease. Meaning that the easier it is to get it the less likely it is to cause serious illness. The really bad strains are always less infectious than the mild ones. And it cannot survive in the air if temps are >80 degrees F, (per a recent NPR report) which is why it's a winter illness.
All this points to a pretty over hyped situation right now, IMO.
That's a lot of stuff I did not know. You've killed my urge to start buying into the hype... which is mostly just an excuse to start wearing a cool-ass mask...
By "he" I meant our President who was giving an address to the entire nation and which I assumed you, Gaba, were hanging on every precious word! I was hoping I had misheard him and you, or anybody here, could correct me. So did I mishear him or are you going to make me have to try and look it up...there's gotta be transcript somewhere. Maybe I could ask Tele.
Here it is "Obama noted he had asked Congress for $1.5 billion in emergency funds to help build more drug stockpiles and monitor future cases, as well as help international efforts to avoid a full-fledged pandemic, an epidemic that spreads widely across the globe." http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090430/ap_ ... e_flu_us_8
Money well spent???
I think we might be overreacting to this "potential pendemic" but what if we're not? We just dropped a trillion dollars on a budget and we probably go through 1.5billion every month in Iraq. It's a drop in the bucket to make sure we're not caught unprepared. It's not even $5 per person.
I'm not worried about it, but I'm glad they are. It's their job to be worried about it.
It remains to be seen IMO. But I DOUBT it. But then again, it's just a drop in the bucket compared to all the other money we are pullin' out our ass to deal with everything and anything else that needs play money thrown at it. Hmmm, I wonder how much of that 1.5 billion will be spent on saving actual American citizens lives?
I find it very interesting that people seem so confident that this virus somehow can't survive here because, "it's spring & getting warm." Um... where did the thing originate? ....
2023 Chicago Bears... emerging from a long hibernation, and hungry!
There's a certain group of people (do I really need to say it) that like to bury their heads in the sand and pretend there's a problem. This would be fine if they wouldn't b*tch NON-F*&KING-STOP that everyone else isn't doing the same.
Torture... not a problem if it's getting the job done and/or only a problem because you're talking about it.
War in Iraq... we're WINNING!
Global warming... doesn't exist.
Education... my kid's private school is doing just fine.
Swine flu... will never affect us.
Pretending there's not a problem and hoping for the best might be okay when your check-engine-soon light is on. It's not okay when lives are at stake.
Actually my kid's private school is about to have to close. Not enough students. My dad is interviewing for another job. And public schools suck. And that's the governments' fault. They make a fucking mess of EVERYTHING they put their hands on.
MamaBear wrote:Actually my kid's private school is about to have to close. Not enough students. My dad is interviewing for another job. And public schools suck. And that's the governments' fault. They make a f**king mess of EVERYTHING they put their hands on.
I guess if you live in the city that may be true. Growing up in a suburb though, I enjoyed my public school experience (well, as much as any kid can *enjoy* school).
I live in a tiny little town (pop. about 2500) and work in a school in a bigger town (pop. about 13,000). The district I work in is bleeding. We already closed two bulidings and squished everybody into the remaining 5. The buildings themselves are full of asbestos and falling down around our ears. The technology available to our kids is a joke. We just rifted 17 more teachers and I expect paraprofessional jobs will be cut too. This means bigger class sizes and special ed kids getting the shaft, with clever ideas like putting the emotionally disturbed kids in with the kids with multiple-disabilities. I asked out superintendant just the other day if things were going to get better once that stimulus money starts rolling in. She laughed at me. She said she doubts we see a dime of that. I don't know what we're going to do if we can't pass this new levy we have coming up. I doubt we pass it though. Nobody wants to pay any new taxes right now!
I enjoyed my public school experience just fine. It just didn't do sh*t to prepare me for college. That's not all public schools but it was definitely mine. The valedictorian of my class lives in the same sh*tty neighborhood I do. It'd be nice if everyone had access to a decent education.
By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer Mike Stobbe, Ap Medical Writer – Fri May 1, 6:27 pm ET
ATLANTA – The swine flu virus that has frightened the world is beginning to look a little less ominous. New York City officials reported Friday that the swine flu still has not spread beyond a few schools. In Mexico, very few relatives of flu victims seem to have caught the virus.
One flu expert says there's no reason to believe the new virus is a more serious strain than seasonal flu. And a federal health official said the new flu virus doesn't appear to have genes that made the 1918 pandemic flu strain so deadly.
It's too soon to draw any definitive conclusions about what this variation of the H1N1 virus will do. Experts say the only wise course is to prepare for the worst. But in a world that's been rattled by the specter of a global pandemic, glimmers of hope are welcome.
President Obama noted Friday that it's not clear that the swine flu outbreak will turn out to be any worse than ordinary flu.
"It may turn out that H1N1 runs its course like ordinary flus, in which case we will have prepared and we won't need all these preparations," Obama said.
But "we're taking it seriously," he said. Even if the flu turns out mild now, it could come back in a deadlier form during the normal flu season, he said.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the illness so far had proven to be "a relatively minor annoyance."
City health officials say they have found few signs that the local outbreak of swine flu is spreading beyond a few pockets or getting more dangerous. The city has 50 cases, the most of any city in the United States.
Dr. Peter Palese, a leading flu researcher at New York's Mount Sinai Medical School, said the new virus appeared to be similar enough to other common flu strains that "we probably all have some type of immunity."
"There is no real reason to believe this is a more serious strain," he said.
Also Friday, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the new swine flu virus lacks the genetic traits that made the 1918 pandemic strain so deadly.
CDC flu chief Nancy Cox said the good news is "we do not see the markers for virulence that were seen in the 1918 virus." Nor does swine flu virus have the virulence traits found in the H5N1 strain of bird flu seen in recent years in Asia and other parts of the world, she said.
"However, we know that there is a great deal that we do not understand" about the strength of the 1918 virus and others that caused serious illnesses, she said. "So we are continuing to learn."
Another CDC official, Dr. Anne Schuchat, said preliminary studies suggest that in U.S. households with an infected person, about a quarter of other family members are getting sick as well.
In some pandemics, the overall infection rate has been as high as 35 percent, Cox said.
She noted the CDC has entered the gene information for the new virus into databases that are publicly available.
"A lot of researchers around the world can begin to look at those gene sequences as well, in case they see something we haven't already seen," she added.
The global flu epidemic early last century was possibly the deadliest outbreak of all time. That virus also was an H1N1 strain — different from the H1N1 strain involved in the current outbreak — and struck mostly healthy young adults. Experts estimate it killed about 40 to 50 million people worldwide.
