Swine Flu

And what a better way to start blogging then by talking about the Swine flu nuttiness, so I ask:

What is this Swine Flu (H1N1) madness?

Have people gone crazy? Perhaps people are just bored. Why is there so much hype?

I do not follow the news and yet all I hear is about the upcoming pandemic. This is what I have heard:

(How could these cute guys cause so many problems? You know they most likely have to deal with people flu pandemics more often then we deal with the swine variety)

Source: A personal physician

Informed us that Swine flu is less deadly than the regular flu. People who die from this are usually the chronically ill who might have died from the regular flu. For most people this disease will take its course in 5 days. 30,000 people die each year as a result of the "regular" flu.

From gawker.com, which I can not vouch for: this website mentions that in 1976 we had a similar 'Swine flu' the NYT headlines:February 20, 1976:" U.S. Calls Flu Alert On Possible Return Of Epidemic's Virus; U.S. FLU ALERT SET ON EPIDEMIC VIRUS" Then the next month Gerald Ford, the president at this time, asks Congress for $135 million to try to create a vaccine, Congress approves the money and a new vaccine is created. The new vaccine ends up being linked with Guillain-Barre Syndrome and use of the vaccine is canceled.

What this tells us is that: first, a cure might be worse than the disease and second, the use of the words 'Pandemic' and 'Epidemic' quickly inspire fear in the populace. One thing that is clear is these words allowed a large sum of money to be approved by Congress to be quickly spent to try and fix something which just naturally went away anyway. This is what makes me worry, is this buttering us up to approve some other Congress budgetary issue which will have a similar response? That is, it will do nothing. Or perhaps, as Mrs. Joe has suggested, this is getting people ready to accept whatever health related piece of legislation that Congress or the President wants approved. Such as... universal health care?

Although I am not a big fan of universal health care, perhaps if the government consolidates it's services to be in the same building, we can wait in the same line for stamps, driver's licence renewals and the routine checkup! Imagine the convenience!

What this says to me is that we as a people need to not be so quick to run like lemmings off of the side of the cliff. The media has been quick to make this into as big of a story as possible and the media is only a reaction of the population, meaning that if we make a big deal of a small thing, so will they.

***Swine Flu Update http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/05/04/swine.flu.main/index.html?eref=rss_topstories