May 05, 2009 08:25 am Is this link viral?
swine flu
Posted on May 05, 2009 04:32 am
fortymile
Member Since: Jan 18, 2003
there's a chance i've already had it. i think i might have had it. a client of mine returned from mexico around easter and everyone felt a little weird. for me it was a two-hour thing. a flu that turned out not to be.
if so, i'm better off than you guys should the thing mutate by fall!
swine flu: get it now. get it early.
i don't think i'll turn into something bad this fall, but watch this anyway. it's quite good. a spooky 5-part PBS documentary on the 1918 pandemic:
'i had a little bird. his name was enza. i opened up the window, and in-flu-enza...'
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May 05, 2009 10:21 am Another example of the media having nothing better to do than fearmongering and satiating alarmists across the country.
I saw the most retarded graphic on the news yesterday that illustrates my point exactly. It was a map of the US with 13 states painted bright, flaming red. Those are the "infected" states. Then the caption below the graphic showed that there were only 250 or so cases nationwide, with 1 death.
OK, in a country with nearly 300 million residents, 250 cases is a non-issue. It's more likely that you will catch smallpox than H1N1. It's more likely that you will be struck by lightning than be infected by H1N1. It's not even a blip. 1 person in a million has caught it. That's not only not an epidemic or pandemic, its not even a trend!
This is the exact reason I don't watch the evening news, CNN, or any national or local news. I get my weather on the internet, and anything else that's important enough to know, I'll find out. I have much better things to do than worry about **** that's so remotely possible that it'll more than likely never affect me nor anybody I know.
May 05, 2009 10:34 am Worrying about H1N1 is going to cause more deaths that the flu itself.
May 05, 2009 11:38 am This is nowhere near the killer flu that News Media hyped it up to be.
I have it, and as far as bad flu's that I have had in my life time. It ranks about a 3.
And no. I am not apart of the 250 listed on the News.
Why?
Because of no health insurance. So, I don't get the honor of being a statistic on the news. Oh well.
If this flu ranked any higher then a 7, then maybe I would have went to a doctor. But for a 3.... Yeah. Stay in bed, drink lots of fluids, and don't go around shaking other peoples hands. Got that. I think I'll live.
May 05, 2009 11:42 am It's just another stupid media/gov't scare tactic...to keep everybody worried and assure us gov't is the only answer to all of lifes challenges...
nothing scared gov't more than people that can take care of themselves.
May 05, 2009 01:02 pm It is dB. But, to a small degree, I can understand why they panicked at first.
H1N1 was the killer flu in 1918. Even thought the swine flu uses the same keys, it does no have the same genetic markers that the one in 1918 had.
The 1918 one set up in the upper part of the lung. And that is what made it so deadly. The victim suffocated. The swine flu barely even makes it to your lungs. It seems to love the back of your throat. Which on the first day, feels like it's on fire. But, goes away ratter quickly. And settles into your nasal passages.
Can you tell that I watch a lot of PBS?
So, Mexico started yelling H1N1, and all others panicked. All of this because they didn't check the genetic markers first. If they did, they would have known that this is a nothing flu.
May 05, 2009 07:07 pm you have the swine flu, rob? officially confirmed?
my perspective on this stuff is different. i find this stuff inherently fascinating. i also feel that blaming the media is just the trendy thing to do, mainly. it makes peeps feel superior, right?
it's hard to imagine what else they coulda done but report on the unfolding story. people forget that for two or three days, there was no information on what this was, other than the fact that it appeared to be a new strain and that people in mexico were dying. as rob said, that was probably mexico's fault, although it probably also takes two days to get your **** together and sequence a strain and figure out what the threat is (and by then, quarantines are already happening, etc). anyway, knowing what we know about viral evolution and past pandemics, how do you NOT report on early events that seem to point to something bad? of course you do; it's your explicit function. if you're the news, you notice what the WHO is doing and you report on it. you report on what health officials are doing with closures and quarantines and stuff. it's all happening in an informational vacuum, but yet steps have to be taken, and quickly. that means news. and once news starts, you're stuck with it; you have to keep going.
the one big mistake i see here is a quote from that woman at the WHO, the asian woman, who hyped it way too much during a press conference. but the big media mistake is simple: they don't get into the science, because they think people can't grasp it. so you get vague reports about impending doom. in an ideal world, they would have reported on what's known and what's not, in detail. how viruses work and evolve, best-case scenarios and worst-case. there just wasn't much of that. they fed the fire by appealing to ignorance, almost deliberately. news is like that with science.
but there's no conspiracy here.
tadpui: in a couple scenarios it's pretty likely that you'll be infected with h1n1, actually. unless it goes dormant then it'll still be here in the fall, and the thing has a novel protein coat, which means that your immune system will have to learn how to manufacture antibodies from scratch. that's the whole point here. it's a burglar with a skeleton key but it's not currently dangerous because once it gets into your house it just chills out. the only reason it's not spreading hardcore is that it's slow in making copies of itself, or it has trouble getting expelled from the lungs, or both. it wouldn't be unlikely for those things to both change by fall, since natural selection will work on that. i think you can assume that if you get exposed, even now, you will likely get it. it just won't be any big deal. the other remaining question is whether or not it will become more virulent by fall, like the 1918 flu did. i'm not sure why the 1918 pandemic started off mild and then evolved into something else. it's one of those things that's hard to find out without digging. i'd like to know exactly how that one mutated. some radical shifts would have to happen inside the genome for it to be truly deadly, seems like, and it just seems like they won't. there's that one missing amino acid, and it just doesn't seem like the sort of thing that's just gonna happen.
but for anyone who thinks that comparing swine flu to the regular flu by using numbers makes any sense, it doesn't and never did, because it's not the point. it's about having a checklist of possibilities and realizing that for the first time in decades, most of the boxes are all green. regular flu will always kill thousands, but the deal with new strains is the potential to turn deadly quickly because of lack of immunity and normal mutations. it's also about the tendency for new strains to kill the young.
so i basically dislike the perspective that this kind of thing is overhyped. WHO and CDC have to jump into action quick, and if they didn't it'd be negligence. there is another pandemic coming in the future. viruses are always trying to outsmart us. it's unfortunate how the public perception is 'boy who cried wolf' again. the populace is not smarter than epidemiologists, though now--lamely--they think they are.
people thought bird flu was a false alarm, but it wasn't: people just didn't understand the point. the point of culling birds was to prevent it from spreading within bird populations, the thinking being 'better to try to make this thing go extinct now.' we failed, though. it's now worldwide in birds. it has a 60 percent fatality rate when humans catch it, which is huge. swine flu should show pretty clearly the danger here. if h5n1 mixes inside a pig with other viruses, then you'd end up with a burglar with a skeleton key who's armed with an ak-47.
May 05, 2009 07:36 pm Well, it's not official diagnosis by a doctor examining me. This came form the jerks that I work with that gave it to me. Whom their doctors official diagnosed as H1N1.
And yes, our drum tech is apart of the official 250 or so in PA. I Official thank him for it today. And told him that I was done with, and he could have it back at anytime.
Do you do Bio research Forty?
May 05, 2009 07:42 pm but h1n1 is also the name of the seasonal flu...
research? no way. i'm just a curious guy in an armchair, and by armchair i mean 'the floor.' it bugs me that i can't find out what i want to know about this easily. viral evolution is to me really interesting. but i'm not really aware of any books besides the hot zone and the great influenza--but finding info online that's both detailed and easy to read is hard.
i think we can blame ted turner for the alarmism, ultimately. the 24 hour news cycle is pretty much why things get blown out of proportion--it happens with everything. if we only had nbewspapers, it'd pretty much be the same information out there, but repeated far less times. people could feel more like they're deciding to care or not to care. but with 24 hour news, you can't really escape the latest fashionable story.
May 05, 2009 07:47 pm There are a few people that live around me that have Biology degrees. I'll ask if they know of any research books that you can look up.
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