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Flu + La Nina = Pandemic?
New submitter MrEricSir writes with some scary speculation from a BBC article about the confluence of climate and disease: "A correlation between illness and cold weather is nothing new but this one is very specific: La Nina changes the migratory patterns of birds which can (and often does, according to this theory) cause flu pandemics."
The ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) usually exhibits a period of three to five years - so it's not exactly like La Niña is an uncommon event. If there's a correlation, it's pretty weak.
#DeleteChrome
"dang warm I can't catch it at the mall because I'm playing outside in the beautiful weather."
Just watch out for the West Nile virus. Dengue fever is starting to show up in higher latitudes as well. Better yet, just don't leave the house. And disconnect the computer from the internet so you don't catch a virus that way either.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
That's not what pandemic means. (A flu which affects a wide area and makes people sick is just regular old seasonal flu.) A pandemic is an epidemic of a single flu strain which occurs on a global scale.
Don't make me define "epidemic" for you.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The pandemic word is used to create terror. With two patients of the same desease in different continents you have a pandemic.
Oh shut up. Pandemics are real. And potentially very dangerous. Not everything is hype. Take some more happy pills or go over to one of the copyright threads and angst there.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It does not have to be "global scale". Here is a quote from the WHO criteria for declaring a pandemic.
"The Pandemic will be declared when the new virus sub-type has been shown to cause several outbreaks in at least one country, and to have spread to other countries, with consistent disease patterns indicating that serious morbidity and mortality is likely in at least one segment of the population."
So a new flu strain in two countries that could cause death in elderly people would be considered a pandemic. That is far from a global scale. It may eventually become global but does not need to be global to be declared a pandemic.
A World Pandemic is eventual, and probably will be worse than previous Pandemics. With Climate Change increasing rapidly, Polution getting worse, and Population on the rise, I'm surprised a global virus hasn't killed millions of people yet.
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with HIV?
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Or you could learn some HTML so you could write “La Niña.” It's pretty easy to look this stuff up...
Why in the fuck would you use an HTML entity for a perfectly valid character?
It's SLASHDOT'S fault that anything unicode gets fucked to hell.
HTML entities are for ESCAPING special characters like < via < so they're interpreted and rendered as text and not code.