Oh yes, locked up in a tube for several hours, breathing the same air.
*How many have died so far of swine flu in Mexico? Out of a country of how many million? *
That doesnt make sense. The real question is how many died out of how many infected not how many died vs country population. I mean a 50% mortality rate is terrible regardless if youre in China or Luxembourg. A disease with a 50% mortality rate thats spreading quickly is scary regardless of national origin. Virus dont see borders, they just see hosts.
A local newspaper printed this information from the CDC and DHS:
Here is an excellent article on the problems with reporting on the Swine Flu and where we are at with the knowledge currently.
But the people holding a press conference on swine flu in New York today are not concerned that malaria will sweep into New York City this week.
And I do see media frenzy for malaria pretty regularly – just try to say something nice about Rachel Carson, and a pro-DDT person pops up like a prairie dog and blames her for the malaria epidemic.
I’m wondering something about the WHO’s alert levels. How high have they gotten in the past? Right now it’s at level 5, one right below pandemic. Has this ever happened before? How does this compare to other outbreaks like SARS?
I don’t think it does compare, but is more a reflection of the uncertainty surrounding this particular strain of influenza. I for one am somewhat concerned, mostly for mine and other’s children. Daycare centers and schools would be fertile breeding grounds for this shit, and kids don’t wash their hands or practice as good of hygiene as adults do, in general.
I think there is a big reason why flu and SARS got and are getting so much more attention than, say, malaria.
Malaria isn’t something that is transmitted person-to-person, so the threat of it spreading is limited. Cholera is the same way. Those may both be terrible diseases taking horrible tolls of life, but they’re not going to endanger people who are not in specific locations.
Malaria and cholera are also not going to infect the health-care workers and lead to potentially serious damage to the health-care system. That is one of the major underlying fears about new infectious diseases - that our ability to treat the disease and bring it under control would be seriously damaged.
The media certainly heats up the stories of infectious disease spread, but having just returned from a business trip to Mexico that was aborted by the flu outbreak, I can guarantee you that the people there are extremely nervous about the situation. It’s not clear how contagious this strain is, but I’d much rather see too much hype than a ho-hum attitude that resulted in more deaths than would have otherwise happened.
Or because people believe hype. CNN and MSNBC reported on Monday that the stock market closed down because of the flu outbreak and related fears. It’s a ridiculous assertion on its faceL even if traders were concerned about the flu and traded differently as a result, the reality is still that the stock market closed down because of the wall to wall, nonstop, light-on-facts chatter about it on, ironically, CNN and MSNBC. It’s the sort of thing that can easily turn into self-fulfilling prophecy.
That’s a false dichotomy. We should be wishing for reasonable, fact-driven, proportional news coverage, not “too much hype” for the sake of safety. Too much hype won’t drive safety because people will tune it out.
[QUOTE=tumbleddown;
That’s a false dichotomy. We should be wishing for reasonable, fact-driven, proportional news coverage, not “too much hype” for the sake of safety. Too much hype won’t drive safety because people will tune it out.[/QUOTE]
Not necessarily. People will tune it out when it stops being reported because it stops affecting our part of the world.
• People cannot get swine influenza from eating pork or pork products. Most influenza viruses, including the swine flu virus, are not spread by food.
•** Eating properly handled and cooked pork products is safe**.
• No food safety issues have been identified, related to the flu.
• Preliminary investigations have determined that none of the people infected with the flu had contact with hogs.
• The virus is spreading by human-to-human transmission.
[/QUOTE]
Just this evening, my stepmother announced she didn’t want to eat the pork roast I had fixed for dinner. My father gave her the WTF look, while I laughed, and laughed.
I finally helped convince her that it was safe to eat though. Had to tell her I bought it months ago, before the beginning of this whole thing. BTW, she had bacon for lunch!
Perhaps “hype” is a poor choice of words. However, there has been a fair amount of criticism of the Mexican government because they did not begin reporting this early enough. On the other hand, had they begun reporting significantly earlier, and nothing had come of it, then they’d be criticized for generating hype and panic.
People tend to tune out safety messages for a number of reasons. There are always those who die in hurricanes because they don’t - or won’t - believe the warnings. People will hear the same message in very different ways - to some it will be hype, and to others it will be reasoned warnings.
So far, I haven’t seen much coverage that is not fact-driven. I suppose one could argue that coverage of potential disease spread is simply conjecture, but those projections are based on serious study, so in reality it’s much more than conjecture. I agree that one can argue that seeing such lengthy and repeated coverage - all pandemic all the time - could be too much coverage. Perhaps it’s out of proportion, perhaps not. We’ll only know for sure in retrospect.
But again, in a situation like this, I think we’re better off to err on the side of caution.
You’d think we were facing a pandemic of Captain Trips based on the media coverage. :rolleyes:
I thought I’d read that the WHO alert level system was put in place in 2005. I’m pretty sure this is the first time it’s been at level 5. Here’s a nice breakdown of pandemic phases: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30442376/
Yes, but as I noted in a previous message, other forms of the flu result in thousands of deaths a year, and are transmitted person-to-person, and the public doesn’t freak out every flu season.
Seasonal flu is generally of a type that a portion of the population has an immunity to, plus vaccinations are generally available to the populations most vulnerable to complications, subject to exposure, or likely to spread it to many others. In spite of those two differences between seasonal and swine/H1N1 flu, thousands of people still die from seasonal flu every year. Taking away immunity and vaccinations makes a difference.
Also, seasonal flu deaths are concentrated among the very young and very old. That is not what has been seen in Mexico so far. They are reporting about 150 deaths of basically healthy adults from flu-like symptoms. That is not typical of seasonal flu.
Finally, baseline deaths from seasonal flu are what they are. Decisions about swine/H1N1 flu should be made at the margin.
Indeed, some people having had swine flu are now reported to be “cured” 
Doesn’t AIDS have a much longer incubation period, with milder syptoms?
If so, I don’t think AIDS would have been stomped out quickly.