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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."
Who does raise the swine flu threat level?
I get the feeling that Media outlets are DESPERATELY Hoping that this will be a Pandemic... as if they're bored or really really really like human suffering... oh wait, what's that saying about if it bleeds it's frontpage news? Sigh. --Ray PS> Would hate to die of Swine Flu, just because of what it's called... and all that it would imply if I caught it...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
The sad thing is that it will affect the poor and the Third World most of all. Only the extremely ill, old, young, and those with compromised immune systems will have a problem in more developed countries where antiviral medicine is available.
$50 for some medicine is pretty much nothing in the U.S., for instance. If you're in India or China, well... life's going to get rough for a lot of people there.
""Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, the WHO raised the pandemic threat level for H1N1 "swine flu" to 5."
Wow. I knew they had good music but I did not know Peter Townshend was in charge of changing pandemic threat levels.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
I read an article a couple days ago, apparently there was a swine flu outbreak in 1976, and the US was quite proactive in stopping it, encouraging everyone to get vaccinated. The problem came when more people died from the vaccine than from the flu. So the correct path of action is not always clear, how far should you go to try to prevent this? Wall Street Journal has an interesting article dealing with these issues.
As for me, being young and healthy, looks like I'm about to roll one of my d20. Whatever happens happens, I'll enjoy it to the end.
Qxe4
Nigel Tufnel: You see, most organizations, you know, will be warning at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your warning. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One warninger.
Everyone knows nerds are pigs.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The media can do what they will with this non-story.
I'm safe - I don't believe in that e-vo-lution crap, so this new disease could not have evolved from swine! It's all just pig nonsense.
I'm going back to prepare a round of raw bacon sushi!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Bah, we all should know this "swine flu" is actually a well orchestrated distraction from our real threat.
ZOMBIES!
Fear not the Swine Flu pandemic. Fear instead the imminent Zombie pandemic.
Unless of course this is just phase 1...
and for big drug companies to capitalize on, is what 99% of this is...
Only 7 swine flu Deaths, not 152...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
"Citation needed."
Seriously, I see Internet doomsdayers saying this, but I don't see the CDC saying this. So, can you provide a link to a reputable source for this? I'm genuinely interested in reading one. If not, then perhaps you should stop spreading it.
One of the remarkable facts about this outbreak is that the deaths in Mexico are primarily among healthy adults between 20 and 50--similar to the profile of the Spanish flu of 1918. However, one of the yet unresolved puzzles about the virus is why the mortality figures in Mexico are proportionally so much larger than in the USA, so yeah, we just don't know what's going on yet...
Are you adequate?
Maybe you're both jackasses; the mother of the child is a jackass of the sort that has adamant beliefs about things for no good reason other than she needs something to believe to explain it, like parents that believe mercury in vaccines gave their child autism, seeing as how the tests for that farm came back negative; and I'm a jackass for joining in.
No five pages?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
in the US alone there are An estimated 100,000 hospitalizations and about 20,000 deaths occur each year from the plain old flu or its complications... so what is the big deal?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egypt-orders-slaughter-of-all-pigs-over-swine-flu-1676090.html
Egypt began slaughtering the roughly 300,000 pigs in the country Wednesday as a precautionary measure against the spread of swine flu... Agriculture Minister Amin Abaza told reporters that farmers would be allowed to sell the pork meat so there would be no need for compensation.
Yeah, what's the price of pork in a vastly flooded market. Other stories on the subject report riots by the pig farmers and also note that the WHO says that you can't catch it from eating pork. This is more a case of the non-pork eating religious majority using this as an excuse to crap on the pork eating religious minority (and 'unclean' pig farmers.)
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
The Stonecutters!
I was once a horse.
Allow me to explain my bias before embarking on this rant: I currently attend University of Delaware. At present there are 10 unconfirmed cases among the student body. Not a big number (total student number is ~13,000), but diseases do have a tendency to spread quickly among student populations.
What bothers me about this isn't that people are overreacting, which they are to a large extent. 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. There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction that says that swine flu won't cause any sort of devastation; that it's not something to worry about.
The fact of the matter is that while they're probably right, there's no reason not to take simple precautions. So long as this is going on, I'll make sure to was my hands with soap and water after using the bathroom, to try to avoid sick people, and to go to health services if I start showing flu-like symptoms. On the other hand, I hear plenty of people at school saying that they don't care, that if they get it it's "just the flu." I see a lot of people here on /. saying that this is just a media circus and just for drug companies to capitalize on. Maybe you guys are right, but what if you aren't?
As I said, I'm biased since I'm in a hot zone, but I'd rather be safe about this than contract it.
It's the Aporkalypse!
SHUT! DOWN! EVERYTHING!
For example, Madagascar has just closed its seaport. And here I was, so close, to winning :(
Damn Congress, we told them to cut the pork, and the jerks bring the plague on the House instead.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
1) more than 1% .1% to 1% .1%
2)
3) less than
We still don't know which range we're dealing with and, uh, like, it matters.
All it would take is to focus on a standard sample like Mexico City hospital interns, process their swabs STAT and count the deaths so far.
Seriously, folks, where are the adults?
Seastead this.
I know that, I'm asking for a source that swine flu is killing via it. Not a blog post, or a speculative news media story, a source from someone like the CDC. Doesn't have to be the CDC, but a group that would know what the hell they are talking about.
People, stop spreading this stupid, unfounded meme. The folks who have been verified to have died from H1N1 2009 have been from a country with a poor health care system and a city that is horrible in terms of air pollution and other environmental conditions. No one except the Internet whargarbl squad is stating that the EIGHT people that the WHO has verified have died from this virus(the most well documented death being of a 23 month old, the very definition of those at-risk for dying from influenza) are adult, healthy people by first world standards. Even the guy who "died from the swine flu" and gave Obama that tour, turns out to not have had "swine flu" at all.
Yes, it is alarming in the sense that it is spreading so quickly off-season and it certainly is getting a lot of media attention, but I've seen people using the phrase "cytokine storm" who couldn't tell you what a deviated septum was last week. Knock it off already.
the secessionist talk in Texas--the proud Texan has switched from public talk of making 5 states out of Texas to seeking federal assistance and stocks of Tamiflu to help keep the swine flu pandemic from overrunning the Texas border. Now we are talking about the sane goodness of having sound public health policies along with preparedness planning and funding. What next? Public vaccination programs coming into favor again?
There's something vaguely comforting and familiar about medical professionals also starting their indexes at 0.
i don't want their bugs in any case.
Most of the deaths reported in the press have been non-elderly adults, as opposed to the regular flu where 90% of the deaths are already-sick old people and the rest are mostly kids who are too young for flu shots. Until the latest news articles (which said that "150 deaths" was "maybe actually only 7-8 confirmed to be swine flu"), the number of deaths from swine flu was about 1% of the total number of regular-seasonal-flu deaths during the past week.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
To whomever tagged this with suddenoutbreakofswineflu: genius. haha
Am I the only one in who's mind "Patient Zero" is irrevocably bound to Sylar from Heroes?
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
No. This has been a perfect opportunity to scapegoat factory farming.
It may or may not be the problem. This are PIGS we're talking about
here. These the original "dirty farm animal". So the idea that it's
necessarily a problem of industrialization is somewhat absurd.
Now there are Mexican officials that are allege that Smithfield is
not the problem and that the farm in question has tested negative
for this. However, you can't trust any Mexican official since they're
so corrupt. You can't really know what to trust.
The problem down there could easily be off by a couple of orders of
magnitude due to corruption, gross ineptitude or just indifference.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A concentrated solution of silver ions is the most effective antiviral and antibacterial substance known. Please see http://www.pstca.com/silversol/index.htm for more information. Check "Examples of SilverSol Generators" at http://www.pstca.com/silversol/use/csgen.htm I just finished updating it with somewhat detailed instructions on how to make and use your own system.
Mike Monett
P.S. No worries about Aryyria. Use sublingual absorption and spit most of it out.
This is how it always starts...
If you look at that CDC search, one article that jumps out is this one, which says that based on later research, it looks like the big killer wasn't actually the influenza itself or related cytokine storms, but secondary bacterial infections causing pneumonia among people weakened by the influenza. That's actually fairly good news, because it's much more likely that we can treat those in a hurry with existing antibiotics (as opposed to waiting 6 months to get a newly-tuned H1N1 vaccine or using the increasingly-ineffective antivirals like Tamiflu), and because quarantine also reduces the spread of bacterial infections so people who do get the flu are less likely to get the secondaries.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
sorry, I did.
I loved the scene in Outbreak, where they're showing the different biocontainment levels. Level one show people walking around without masks, it was only the people working the chemicals that hand any sort of protection. Level two had masks and rubber gloves, but people were still walking in and out without masks. Level three had people with masks, rubber gloves, white cloth body suits, and working in fume hoods. Still, doors were left open, and people walked in and out without masks. Then biohazard 4: Armed guards, security keypad and fingerprint scan, a second set of secure doors, then a rubber body suit, then an air lock, then you get to the lab.
Hollywood!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The vector that propagated the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic was soldiers returning from The World War, and people who were exposed to them, so young people with healthy immune systems were the primary people exposed to the flu, especially since they tended to be crowded together in barracks, ships, and trains where it could easily spread. So the fact that most of the deaths were younger people doesn't tell you as much as it might.
On the other hand, the world population is much more mobile than it was in 1918 - travel's radically cheaper, and most people aren't farmers who stay home or occasionally go from their villages to small towns; everybody's on the move all the time, so it's easier for infected people to spread disease around than it was for most people in 1918.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Mexico's response has been so disorganized they have no CLUE who "patient zero" is.
Yeah, the part I found especially interesting is, you've got this 5 year old with the swine flu, yet they test others in the town and it turns out this kid was the only person in town that contracted swine flu. Then they go and test the pig farm where they believe the kid may have contracted it from, and all the tests come back negative.
So you've got the original infection vector, but no identifiable source it could have been contracted from, and no identifiable recipients it could have been passed on to. Seems odd to me.
Flanders! Open up!
Yes yes. I suppose Obama paid for all that Tamiflu out of his own lined pockets...
Oh... wait...
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Yup ..., oh well maybe, but I'm realy sure Conficker is to be held resposible for the pandemic. If only we could detect where it downloaded the swine virus from?....
Not to fret, V50 things will continue to go downwards - and increasingly so - thanks to NO ACTION YET taken on those factors leading to the present financial meltdown (namely financial regulation measures) which will only continue to get worse...and worse....and worse....we are quickly reaching the point of critical mass, if we haven't already arrived - in America - for offshoring of American jobs. There simply aren't that many left to offshore anymore. And eventually the college system will only cater to the super rich and foreign students as America students who can afford it will have all but disappeared - after all, who can spend a small fortune for college when loans can never be repaid?
Can you imagine any possible news story where you would not find it relevant to bring up Bush? Let it go already, it's over.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
And as I've been saying, it's extremely likely that people with those secondary problems seek attention. And we have a ton of options to treat pneumonia and asthma in the U.S. and Europe. So far, almost none of the 90+ cases in the U.S. are proving to be fatal. We are well taught to take drugs for any serious illness by now.
Too bad people in Africa, Asia, South America, and other places with a larger population that's more rural don't have the ability or access to deal with more than a handful of serious cases. Note - this also would apply to rural and hard to reach areas in the U.S., like Alaska. It appears that survivability is directly based upon how quickly you can get to medical help.
And all organic.
As a bonus, it's "green". Anyone who succumbs to this will naturally reduce their carbon footprint.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I would think government officials should be up in arms about swine flu.. a pandemic would sweep through capital hill like a brush fire, dropping congressmen and lobbyists like sacks of flour.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Nah, we jailed that 22 month old infant!
The almost two year old terrorist was protesting a wet diaper by crying...outside of any 'Free Speech Zone'!
That jail time will teach this dirty diapered terrorist that you just can't just do as you please in this country!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
In all seriousness, I'd rather take my chances with computer viruses.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Was the flu pandemic of 1918 that killed an estimated 20 to 100 million people worldwide newsworthy?
The Dr and Rose appear on a spaceship cunningly disguised as a planet only to find there's a mysterious disease that's killing spectacularly low numbers of people who all happen to live in the same city. Normally he wouldn't worry about it but Rose manages to get infected so the Dr raises the threat level to OMG. He works night and day to find a cure only to be forced to infect himself, die from the disease, but not really as his seemingly magic, but really explainable in materialistic terms, Time Lord powers cause him to regenerate in the form of Tom Baker.
He draws some of his own blood with his sonic screwdriver and, treats Rose, who makes a full recovery. As a gesture of good will, and for the episode to end on a relative high note (despite Tom Baker's haggard appearance), he takes the TARDIS into a low "earth" orbit and sprays the serum into the jet stream, thus curing and inoculating most of the world. The Dr and Rose leave for better times.
Just moments later the Vogons appear and destroy the world to make way for hyperspace bypass.
Now STFU and get on with your life.
Can't. Not with the threat level being orange and all. Wait 'till it's yellow.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Initially, only in Spain.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Except that the US mobilized 4.3 million soldiers and 50 million people died of the flu.
Being crowded together could get all of those soldiers contaminated, but then each one of them would have to infect twelve other non-soldier people after being released from that togetherness.
I dont eat pork, care to apologize to me?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I guess we need the help of The Doctor, and Martha Jones. If it spreads to Wales, then Torchwood can help.
On the bright side, due to the colossal stupidity of the public, pork prices are droping.
In down times it is good to have some cheap meat products at the store.
Pork, its what's for dinner. :)
The first symptom of this flu is lack of appetite. If you feel so, you must be the suspect!!
Swine flu is a horrible name.
I'm going to call it "bacon lung".
Everything's better with bacon.
And as I've been saying, it's extremely likely that people with those secondary problems seek attention. And we have a ton of options to treat pneumonia and asthma in the U.S. and Europe. So far, almost none of the 90+ cases in the U.S. are proving to be fatal. We are well taught to take drugs for any serious illness by now.
Regrettably, we're trained to take drugs for *any* illness.
...the economic crisis is no longer.
Right?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Then they go and test the pig farm where they believe the kid may have contracted it from, and all the tests come back negative.
They should check the birds too. Or another animals as posible vectors.
Is anyone else worried that Swine Influenza could combine with Mad Cow Disease to create the deadly "Mad Cone Flu"?
I hear it's quite bad...
"If it bleeds it leads"
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
If they do a concert to aid Swine Flu victims, I hope Robert Daltrey is there.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
With all the media hype you'd think everyone had the swine flu, but in reality there have only been 91 confirmed cases in the US. Not saying this isn't something to worry about, but it's only 91 cases in the WHOLE US!
New Drinking Game!
Anytime you hear a major news media talk about swine flu, Take a drink an speak pig latin until the broadcast changes subject.
Yep, I'm a Karma whore....
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Given that the pigs farmers are almost all part of the Coptic Christian minority, which has a history of being oppressed, this doesn't surprise me at all. As parent says, it's not about the swine flu.
Coptic Christians have it very rough in Egypt; if they are the majority of pig farmers then this is a very plausible explanation for Egypt acting so silly over this.
"Current level of influenza pandemic alert raised from phase 4 to 5"
http://www.who.int/en/
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic/phases.htm.
Obviously as it spreads more, the risk is greater, but it isn't some "terror alert level" they're raising, it's the phase in the progression of the outbreak that they're tracking.
I am trained microbiologist and I know what stupid habits these are. It is not only a flu, it is also a HPV (human papiloma virus), and other infections.
If it is banned by an international law we could stop these epidemics. It can be substituted by a bow, like they do in Japan.
By the way, what other non-contact greetings exist in other cultures?
Politicians will never touch this topic as it may damage their rating. But still the handshakes and hugging-kissing at a meeting are medieval things, which came from the time when epidemics decimated up to 75% of population on a regular basis.
I think there is a drug for that! *ducks*
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
You call it swine flu.
I call it weaponized bacon.
------
beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
John Hodgman's blog provided this 1970s USA PSA: Too Fast For The Swine Flu
FSM, grant me the serenity to preview that which I cannot change...
Everyone says that it is not time to panic.
O.K. But how will we know when it is time to panic? Will President Obama make a declaration signed with the Presidential seal? How will we know?
When it is time to panic, what should we do? Run in circles and scream an shout? Or whimper in the corner? Should we gather frogs or should we release all of our frogs?
Where is the panic button, who is in charge of pressing it, and why have they not pressed it yet?
The Tom Baker episodes, from the 70's. You know, before Daleks could fly? You could elude them by finding a staircase.
BTW; The Swine Flu thing is a hoax. Only seven died.
"A member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has dismissed claims that more than 150 people have died from swine flu, saying it has officially recorded only seven deaths around the world.
Vivienne Allan, from WHO's patient safety program, said the body had confirmed that worldwide there had been just seven deaths - all in Mexico - and 79 confirmed cases of the disease."
http://www.smh.com.au/world/only-7-swine-flu-deaths-not-152-says-who-20090429-aml1.html
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnSX_jS0STA
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/183009-Previous-Swine-Flu-Outbreak-Originated-At-Fort-Dix
history repeating?
NWO? fear == control
Ring a ring of nachos
A pocket full of tissues
Arriba Arriba
We all fall down.
It is the law. The law of physics. You got to come to a complete stop before you can backup and run them over again!
What? Like you never did it!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Smithfield is quite 'well known' for its intensive pig farming techniques, let me show you a few links
http://nationalhogfarmer.com/mag/farming_smithfield_draws_mixed/ this is from an industry site not environmentalist hippies
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4035081.stm BBC report.
http://www.saplonline.org/pubs/Quarterly/07-56-04/07_56_4p1415.htm
Here's an extract from the third link.
"When biology student Dana Spinu and I visited Timisoara a few weeks before the Smithfield takeover, we found officials and academics naively unprepared for what awaited them. We were invited to Paderini, one of six Contim farms being operated by a Romanian firm, in its last days of independence before being swallowed up. In contrast to US and Polish hog factories, the operation was scrupulously clean. The effluent was pumped to sewage ponds a kilometer away; the feeder pigs had four times more room than in the United States, twice that required under EU regulations. Piglets were weaned at 36 days and took six months to reach market weight. My description of Smithfield practices--piglets weaned at 11 days and brought to market weight at 120 days, feed doped with growth enhancers and antibiotics, dumpsters overflowing with dead animals--was greeted with incredulity by company veterinarians. "Impossible! Illegal! It can't happen here!"
Smithfield's first move upon its arrival was to fire former managers, post guards at hog factory gates, and order employees to say nothing about their work. Evidence of high level corruption was not long in coming. Local officials were ordered to keep "hands off" the company; academic critics were disciplined. Smithfield's relationship with the neo-liberals who came to power in 2005 was even more intimate. Free of interference, even exempted from EU regulations until 2012, Smithfield moved rapidly to consolidate its position, reactivating the Contim farms, and buying refrigeration and transportation companies. While the government shut down small slaughterhouses (ostensibly because of the EU), leaving small farmers with no place to market pigs, Smithfield flooded the country with pork imported from Poland and the United States.
In July 2007, however, Smithfield encountered an opponent that it could not bribe. At Cenei, west of Timisoara, 3,500 Smithfield pigs died suddenly. The company blamed it on a heat wave, but nauseating piles of carcasses attracted the press, and the county veterinary inspectorate was forced to do its job. On Aug. 3, it discovered classical swine fever, a viral disease long endemic in Romania, among Cenei's 20,000 pigs. At this point, the "hands off Smithfield" policy came to an abrupt end. The county disease control center halted all movement of Smithfield hogs, freezing its operations; the National Veterinary and Food Safety Authority began emergency inspections of the entire Contim system. Within a few days, two more infected farms with 30,000 pigs were discovered at Igris, on the Hungarian border.
At the same time, it was learned that 11 Smithfield farms had not even applied for sanitary-veterinary authorization and were operating in blatant contempt of Romanian law. Agency head Radu Roatus excoriated local officials and announced that the unregistered farms would be shut down. Agriculture Minister Decebal Traian Remes confirmed that all exposed pigs would be killed and incinerated, and he suggested that the company "probably" would not be compensated for them. Muzzles removed, lesser officials blamed the Americans. "Our doctors have not had access to American farms to perform routine inspections," said Timis county veterinarian Csaba Doraczi. "Every time they tried they were pushed away by the guards." It even came to light that Smithfield workers are paid so little, about $230 US a month, that the company suffered fro
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
I was watching the morning news while drinking some hot coffee and almost had to sue myself. A "Doctor", qualified to discuss topics in and of the medical field, gave the following reason as to why this "Swine Flu" is so bad....
"We know this flu to be different because the common flu typically ends in March and this one is just arriving."
That was all the news crew decided to broadcast. Nothing about the variants of H1N1, H2N1 or even NBE1. Why not at least give an honest attempt at news instead of garbage. And people ask me why I hate watching the news and reading the paper.
There's something vaguely comforting and familiar about medical professionals also starting their indexes at 0.
be even more comforting if they referred to the pig that infected them as "case -1".
Was the flu pandemic of 1918 that killed an estimated 20 to 100 million people worldwide newsworthy?
It was God showing that he could do better than WWI. This one's for Iraq and Afghanistan, so if he is acting in proportion it shouldn't be to bad.
(well its as good as any other theory)
I don't know, but here's my theory on this ...
I'm trying to think sober, no conspiracies, but with the technology of today and current states of affairs..
A lot is going on around the world with the year 2012. Hunderds of believers think the world will radically change that time;
A lot of believers also think there will be a world with many storms and many diseases...
Just think of the motive behind creating such virus towards the population and which they believe when you read the above two lines.
Couldn't it be such virus could be created to fine grain control, using mass-hysteria through science? It has proven to work before.
Or is this really a bad mix of influenza, just coming from 3 parts of the world? (Europe, North America and Asia)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Mission Accomplished!
Or, yes, it _could_ just be that Britney hasn't flashed her cooter recently and the news has to cover _something_. But I'm betting on the former.
Doh.
hope border security is stopping those virus's without visa entry papers.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Speaking as a member of a family who could be devastated by flu (two of us could easily be killed by flu and resulting pneumonia), I am pretty worried. The United States keeps saying "Be concerned, but don't panic." They say it isn't prudent to close borders, schools, etc. To my thinking, isn't this a case of money trumping safety? Sure, there aren't a heck of a lot of cases yet, but I would think the prudent thing to do would be to isolate as many cases as possible, and try to keep this from spreading with every resource at our disposal! Yes, that means border closings. Get our citizens who want to come home back, but place them in isolation until we know they are not carrying. When a case is reported in or near your community, close schools and any non vital business. Tell people to not travel anywhere that isn't necessary. Place sanitiser anywhere in public where multiple people are touching stuff. Distribute medical gloves and masks. Some would say this is overreaction, but it is really the only way to stop this from becoming a pandemic. Serious issue, and we need to treat it as such, and not put the economy above the health of citizens. In Mexico it is hitting healthy people hard, and this should be a major concern. It is quite like the behavior of the last pandemic, although it isn't spreading as quickly. We should be taking every step to stop this now before it gets so large that we can't stop it, or is this a case where we really can't stop it, so we aren't bothering? I know, I am paranoid, but facing a pandemic flu is a very scary proposition for me and my family.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
What i can't make fun of Jew for being stupid here? When did slashdot start protecting religion?
As my Dad used to say, the news is all about "fuzz and was".
Fuzz being slang for police, at least in the 60s/70s
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Hmmm... and just WHO are you to be doing that?
A /. editor let an inaccurate title through to provoke outrage at "the man". Now I've heard everything.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Yeah, you're panicking. That's not helpful. It's already in 11 states at least: it'll be in all of them, borders closed or no.
If you or yours are at risk, keep in mind that regular flu kills 36,000 a year: if that didn't scare you into staying home, why should this, where the survival rate is still unknown? Take a deep breath, away from others :) and make sure your family is retentive about hand sanitizer and staying out of closed public spaces. For as long as they're at risk.
It's good to see the DHS is being proactive...
About halfway down the page:
Anyone exhibiting symptoms is being referred to an isolation room
where they can be evaluated by a public health official before
proceeding to their destruction.
YIKES!
I thought I had the swine flu, but it turns out there was just a pig in my chimney.
BTW, does 5 == orange?
Evolution in action. If you're not the original host to the mutation, then there's a host before you. The news is that they found the original host.
I'm sure that there are quite a few not-quite swine flu viruses around, and that the odds of mutation are sufficiently low, and that the odds of mutation into something harmful are even lower. However, those odds compound over time to practically guaranteeing it will happen someday.
You call it swine flu. I call it weaponized bacon.
I almost peed myself upon reading this post...
Air quality has improved enormously. Mexico City has an objective measurement of air quality (IMECA), you can find historical data here: http://www.sma.df.gob.mx/simat2/index.php?opcion=69
If you play with the data you will see that air quality has improved around 25% respect to 10 years ago. Anecdotally speaking you surely remember the environmental contingencies, when birds died and children didn't go to school. We haven't had one of those for long time, and now once in a while you can actually see the volcanoes surrounding Mexico City again (I just did in my last visit there a couple of weeks ago).
But of course, you can ignore the objective data and allow your political biases to cloud your judgement.
Also medical coverage has actually being widened to people that do not have a formal job by means of a new health insurance.
Notice that air quality has been achieved by leftiest governments, while the medical insurance was promoted by the Federal (right wing) one...
So Mexico may be far from perfect, but there have been improvements and to deny this is misinformed, to say the least.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yup, that pretty much sums it up how this guys and many others work here in Mexico too. It is no surprise that we are one of the countries with worst pollution on soil and rivers. Sadly, most people here thinks thas this is the way that things sould be.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
It shouldn't be over! He and Cheney (among ohers) should be properly judged (in Haia, perhaps).