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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
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...
"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?
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!
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.
There's something vaguely comforting and familiar about medical professionals also starting their indexes at 0.
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
Please STOP spreading this racist, unfounded meme. While Mexico is a developing nation with a "poor" health care system, hospitals in Mexico City and elsewhere are modern, with up-to-date equipment and well-trained personnel. While pollution is a problem, not necessarily more so than in parts of New York City or LA, especially in the downtown zones under the new environmental rules. Significant advances in air quality have been made in the past 10 years, under AMLO and Ebrard.
There is no clear, obvious reason for a higher morality rate across Mexico, including and especially in the downtown Mexico City hospitals, than in the US.
This is how it always starts...
There is no clear, obvious reason for a higher morality rate across Mexico, including and especially in the downtown Mexico City hospitals, than in the US.
Well I heard that the hospital gowns in Mexico actually close in the back and cover the ass completely. If that isn't reason for a higher morality rate, then I don't know what would be...
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
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
Please STOP spreading this racist, unfounded meme. While Mexico is a developing nation with a "poor" health care system, hospitals in Mexico City and elsewhere are modern, with up-to-date equipment and well-trained personnel. While pollution is a problem, not necessarily more so than in parts of New York City or LA, especially in the downtown zones under the new environmental rules. Significant advances in air quality have been made in the past 10 years, under AMLO and Ebrard.
There is no clear, obvious reason for a higher morality rate across Mexico, including and especially in the downtown Mexico City hospitals, than in the US.
Really? I'd think that having minimal running water for days at a time could be a problem. Also, how about a population density that's over seven times that of New York City?
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.
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.
it certainly is getting a lot of media attention
The media attention is due to zeitgeist, not anything in particular about the bug. We live in uncertain times, and people are scared, but mostly they don't have anything to be scared OF.
The economy is burning, they're worried about losing their jobs themselves or that their spouse will, or that they won't be able to keep up with their mortgage or whatever. The economic meltdown is happening slowly, though, and it's hard for people to stay worried about it, so an acute threat that can absorb all of that relatively unfocused anxiety is more than welcome.
We saw this in the late '70's and early '80's as well. One particularly remarkable case was that herpes was at one time considered a huge public health issue... until AIDS came along. While herpes is nasty, the focus on it had far more to do with generalized anxiety about the state of the world and the sexual revolution as boomers started to settle down and have families than any objective threat level.
So after the swine flu mess passes over, expect to see other stories of this kind popping up every few months until global economic conditions start to improve, or until a real threat finally materializes (or is manufactured) to take people's minds off their mundane worries.
It's always possible that this flu will turn out to be a real threat, although in the case of the 1918 flu there was a significantly increased death rate up to three years before: the rate of death from influenza in England and Wales was over 10,000 in 1915, and less than 6000 in the several years before.
The war may have had an effect on this, of course, providing many susceptible human hosts to allow the virus lots of opportunities to mutate into the hellishly virulent strain of 1918. So the odds are that this isn't going to be nearly so bad, but until it's past we won't know, and that could take up to a year, given that the 1918 virus was mild in the spring and unprecedentedly deadly in the fall.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
We live in uncertain times, and people are scared
I wonder if anyone in the history of the world has actually considered the times they lived in to be "certain"?
sic transit gloria mundi
It's not racist. Mexico City's infrastructure is not great on average, and it's MUCH more polluted than NYC or LA. This isn't a knock against Mexicans, it's a fact of life.
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.
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. :)
Swine flu is a horrible name.
I'm going to call it "bacon lung".
Everything's better with bacon.
As soon as viruses or bacterias are exposed to a sun light and a fresh air they began to die or at least get weakened. Some can survive only seconds of such exposure.
We, who saw it in experiments at the microbiological laboratories, should bring this awareness and advice into societal consciousness. It is not about being unfriendly, but about changing a dangerous habit.
There are 6 billions people on Earth now. The handshakes and greeting-hugs like sparks in a room full of a powder. It is the perfect way for viruses to spread in a geometrical progression. What is even more worse is that this European culture of handshakes and greeting-hugs spreads around the world. Indeed, why not using a bow instead?
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
Uhmm....I don't want to sound like a troll but...are you even a Mexican living in Mexico City?
I am and I really don't think air quality has improved in any measurable rate, let alone "significant advances".
Also, while I agree with you on stopping racist memes, Mexico really does have a VERY poor health care system. Those modern, well-equipped hospitals with well-trained personnel are mostly private ones, and the few of them who are actually public ones are not enough to take care of millions of patients. Sure, you might have a surgery with the best equipment in a public hospital, but that's going to happen after a VERY restrictive screening process. There's just not enough money to build a health care system efficient enough to combat a possible pandemic like the one we might be facing.
Hell, our public health care system is in bankruptcy, quickly driving towards the cliff in part because we have more administrative personnel than actual doctors and nurses....go figure... (I can't find the link right now, but it's a well-known statistic down here)
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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
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