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WHO Raises Swine Flu Threat Level
Solarch writes "Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, the WHO raised the pandemic threat level for H1N1 "swine flu" to 5. Global media outlets(such as CNN, Fox News, and the BBC) preempted normal broadcast coverage and immediately published stories on their websites. To clarify, the WHO's elevation is mainly a sign to governments that the virus is spreading quickly and that steps should be taken on a governmental level to stage supplies and medicines to combat a possible pandemic. Unfortunately, broadcast coverage focused on phrases like 'pandemic imminent' (CNN marquee).
In other news, patient zero, the medical term for the initial human vector of a disease, has been tentatively identified in Mexico."
his is getting absurd. Mexico's response has been so disorganized they have no CLUE who "patient zero" is. But it sure is a good opportunity to rail on "factory farms". US-owned, no less! I suppose US owned factory farms also caused the other flu pandemics since the 1500s...
Well, you have to admire their logic on this. So let's take a page out of their playbook! Let's create an "Semitic-flu" and kill all people who speak Arabic, Aramaic and/or Hebrew!
I don't feel the need to wander around with a surgical mask and I'm right in the middle of a hot zone. Rather, what bothers me is that people are underreacting.
This attitude is exactly what scares me. See my other comment http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1215525&cid=27758051, which I quote here "I doubt its government or people is ready for the swine flu. ... I suspect it will take a much greater death toll to scare the US people to really start changing their habits."
Hey dude, everybody wearing a mask whenever they are in public is a major part in how you stop the swine flu from spreading. Note that you wearing a mask is not to protect you (though it is good if everyone thinks that, it encourages people to wear one), but to protect everyone else in case you are infected.
Washing your hands with soap after using the bathroom is not enough, that is what you should be doing normally already. To stop the swine flu, you need to wash your hands every single time you leave a public places, i.e. the first thing you do when you reach you office in the morning, when you return to office after lunch, when you get back home.
The problem is it needs everyone (or almost everyone) doing it to be effective. Wearing mask and washing your hands won't help you a bit if someone else who is infected sneeze or cough right in front of you without wearing a mask, the saliva droplets could land on your eyes for all your mask can do. Doctors in hospitals need to wear face masks with special ventilation to prevent it and still it didn't work 100%.
Not to mention your government officials and social infrastructure are most likely not prepared to close every school if a lot of cases are confirmed to be swine flu. I.e. where do the kids go if school closes? Not everyone has stay home parent to take care of them if school closes. Do your business have contingency plans to allow most of their staff working remotely from home? Or will most still be forced to go to work even in the face of a widespread flu? Will supermarkets be still open if the flu is everywhere? If not, do you have enough food stocked up to last a few weeks? Even worse would be when doctors/nurses in hospital got infected, will they stay in their post risking their lives, or will they strike and refuse to continue (this actually happened during SARS)?
This (and more) was what we did in Asia during SARS, and it was not even as infectious as the swine flu (at least WHO thinks travel warnings was effective to stop SARS, but is not effective now against swine flu).
It doesn't matter if swine flu kills less than 1/10 of the infected compared to SARS if it infects 100x or 1000x as many people, you are going to see death tolls in the thousands or tens of thousands if its spread is not checked soon.
If you are in a hot zone, got look up the archives at the SARS news in Asia, see what happened there and learn how to prepare yourself. Do it for your family's sake at least.
Oliver.
The swine flu program has almost ruined my graduation. I was supposed to travel abroad to Mexico for my final two classes, and *poof* out the window.
Yet again, us poor Americans are suffering the consequences of our own blind greed. Drug cartel violence is spilling over our border because we're too stupid to put them out of business by legalizing a pretty harmless plant. Instead, we continue to legitimize their business by making illegal something that over half the adult population has tried.
Now, we have an infulenza epidemic. Where did it start? A commercial pig farm called Granjas Carrol in Veracruz. Wanna take a guess at the owner? Smithfield Farms. And why, pray tell, does Smithfield have a commercial pig farm in Mexico? Think about it! Cheap labor, cheap animal drugs, and above all, no USDA. Just stuff the pigs in a room, let em wallow in their own waste, and call it a day!
Smithfield, of course, says it's not their fault. Fuck 'em. Americans as a whole need to stop buying products from companies that exploit other countries. You're tellin' me that American farmers can't raise enough fucking pigs for all of us at a decent price? Christ, they'll eat anything you give em! Build a big pen, throw in... well, anything for them to eat, and bam, a year later, BACON!
So fuck you, fellow Americans. Thanks for being selfish and ruining my study abroad. I'll continue to smoke my made-in-America mota and, well, eating pork from my local fucking Pennsylvanian farm.
Which is weird, because I would think that having a deadly disease come from pigs would lend credence to the claim that pigs are filthy animals and should be anathema.
But who said that religion had anything to do with logic...
You wouldn't want to tarnish something as sacred as a deadly virus that kills people, by naming it after an unclean animal.
Well, i guess the Christians and Muslims make asses out of themselves, it's time for the Jews to act idiotic too.