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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...
The sad thing is, you're an idiot talking out your ass.
Maybe try actually learning what this virus does before spouting off like a nob head.
Bullshit. If this were true, the adults with healthy immune systems would be dying and not a 2 year old mexican child who would be more likely to die from normal flu just as much as a swine flu.
This flu isn't any worse than any other flu out there. In fact, if you look at historical statistics on this (from the CDC no less) there are far less people that have died from this in the past 30 years than any common flu in the past five. You aren't helping people by spouting "healthy people are more likely to die!" at all, you are just inciting panic.
Ignore the doomsayers, there is nothing to see here.
You're a downright moron, 100% grade A stupidity.
Read something once in a while instead of spouting bullshit that goes against every report, every previous data set and every single bit of science we have about this.
The Bush Administration's stock in trade was to keep Americans, and if possible the rest of the world, as afraid as possible of all the horrible things that could be about to happen to them, so we'd give all our rights over to Big Daddy Government to protect us. That's why the National Threat Level kept bouncing from Yellow to Orange any time any terrorist chatter said "booga booga" or any Democrat said anything critical of the Bush League, or there was a holiday coming up when Terrorists might attack [Your Local Landmark Here]. And the press bought into it, because telling us to be scared gets people watching your local channel's news shows, and it's much easier for them to pass on and amplify government press releases than send real reporters out to find out real news
Having said that, they didn't mind too much if they thing they were telling us to be afraid of was legitimately scary, like the Avian Flu had the potential to be. Yeah, they blew it all out of proportion, but there was some underlying reality there. It was funny to watch the Bush League, which rabidly opposed teaching Darwinian Evolution in schools, telling us that we had to be really afraid of the bird flu, because it might Evolve, in some Neo-Lamarckian fashion, into a mean nasty killer pandemic, because those mean nasty hostile flu bugs really really wanted to kill us and were sure to figure out a way to do it real soon! And while evolution doesn't work that way, it does happen, and after how nasty SARS really was, the potential for Something Bad happening was there.
So now, when there's another new flu, which may just be another few percent on top of the tens of thousands of regular-flu deaths that happen every year without much reporting coverage or might actually be bad, the press knows how to tell the story of Scary Flu Pandemic Threats, and the Obama Administration hasn't decided to tell people not to be afraid all the time, because maybe they're kind of liking the power a bit, and because it's a lot harder to tell people not to panic when they're in the habit of panicking and when any time you tell people not to panic, some wingnut will start accusing you of covering up (especially if you _are_ covering up...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Are you being dense, a douche bag, or naturally an idiot? How do you think the flu kills young healthy people? The only other explanation is errors in the data (as in deaths of the elderly and infants being underreported). To put it in terms you might understand, if it looks like portscanning, and follows the pattern of portscanning, you call it portscanning.
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!
>> Would hate to die of Swine Flu, just because of what it's called... and all that it
>> would imply if I caught it...
>Then call it Mexican flu.
Same difference
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.
Call it the jew flu. It rhymes.