Interesting stuff from Link
Summary is this: Stop freaking out. This is the flu. Definitely something to be cognizant of but nothing to panic about unless you are in poor health or currently under a heavy dose of antibiotics at the moment.
Snippets form this article:
"The media loves a good scare and the word pandemic is a guaranteed headline grabber. By this evening, there were nearly 70,000 news stories about an influenza pandemic, many accentuated by pictures of crowds of people wearing blue surgical masks. But scaring you half to death with speculations of a new pandemic does little to help you. The known facts, offered in a balanced perspective, is really news you can use.
As is the case with virtually everything scary in the media, reputable scientists and health experts provide reassuring facts and information. The world is not coming to an end and there is surprisingly little cause for panic."
The words epidemic or pandemic been used in nearly every headline. Those words strike fear into the hearts of people. Most consumers think pandemic means something like the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919, which is said to have killed between 20 million to 100 million people. Something like that is unlikely to happen today, however. Nearly a century ago, the standards of living and medical care, for humans and animals, were vastly different. The country was recovering from World War I, with widespread poverty, hunger and unsanitary living conditions, coupled with no available antibiotics or flu medications or modern medical care.
In fact, most of us have lived through a flu pandemic and never even realized it. The Hong Kong flu pandemic in 1968-69, for example, killed an estimated 33,800 Americans. That sounds like a lot, but it’s about the same number of Americans who die from the flu in a typical year.
There’s been a lot of speculation in media that a new flu virus strain — with bits of avian, pig and human viruses and capable of spreading between people — is something ominous. But that’s just the nature of flu viruses: they replicate haphazardly, reshuffling their genetic material from multiple sources. “This natural reassortment will come up with a new flu virus,” said Dr. Christine Layton, Ph.D., MPH. “H1N1 swine flu is one of those, but we’ve certainly seen others in the past 30 years,” she explained to National Geographic News today.
That’s basically why a new influenza vaccine is developed every flu season. As the CDC explained, human infections of swine flu can and do happen.
We’ve been hearing all sorts of numbers and speculations as to how many people have come down with the flu or are dying. We’re also being led to believe that the virus is actively spreading and sickening increasingly more people. “The number of cases has doubled,” television news reported tonight.
But, as Dr. Nancy Cox, Director of CDCs Influenza Division, explained to media yesterday, a total of seven cases of swine flu virus have been confirmed in California, but all of these patients had been sick weeks ago and all have recovered.
The number of confirmed cases nationwide now tallies about 40, but it’s not because the virus is spreading, said Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the CDC. It’s because more tests are being completed. All of the patients have recovered. There have been no deaths. [That's not to say that there probably won't be, of course, because people do die from flus and respiratory infections.]
“So far this is not looking like very, very severe influenza,” said Dr. Schuchat.
The cases we’re seeing outside Mexico have been “no more serious than your average flu bug,” said Dr. Layton.
Most important, greater numbers of deaths in Mexico does not mean that a more virulent strain is present there. Mexico is a country with extreme poverty. Even in the 1990s, more than a third of households had no indoor plumbing and about 20% of homes had dirt floors. With poverty, hunger and lack of good medical care affecting large segments of the population, infections take a much higher toll.
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