Quote: Original post by LessBread
My guess is that banning pork operates as a propaganda vector. The ban brings the news of the flu home to the kitchen in a way that impacts everyone. There's no escaping the warnings.

Why? It's usual situation,something like that was with cow madness, birds flu etc.
I think that probability to "catch" (in russian we are also using this word in double sense) infection via air from another human much more than during work with meat.Virus proteine coagulate under 40*C and higher...if you don't prefer beafstakes with blood-no problem.But who will take a care about your preferences? Probability is very little,but non-zero.
This is temporary measure,of couse,and not political.In the time of Clinton and Lavrov meeting The Big Red Button was pressed . Although that button was named "Peregruzka" (i.e. overload),but all the same...we understand and hope that it was reset [smile]

[Edited by - Krokhin on April 28, 2009 1:41:40 PM]

Quote: Original post by LessBread
The notion that a person could catch swine flu from eating bacon is hilarious, yet it appears to be catching on among fans of right wing radio. The misinformation flu is at pandemic levels. Cover your nose! Wash your hands! Be polite! See a doctor! (If you can afford it).

It's a secret plot by obama to convince us that we need EVIL SOCIALIST HEALTHCARE

Quote: Original post by Krokhin
Why? It's usual situation,something like that was with cow madness, birds flu etc.

I'm just saying that a food scare gets people's attention. Maybe with their ears perked up, they'll get the message to wash hands etc.

Quote: Original post by Krokhin
I think that probability to "catch" (in russian we are also using this word in double sense) infection via air from another human much more than during work with meat.Virus proteine coagulate under 40*C and higher...if you don't prefer beafstakes with blood-no problem.But who will take a care about your preferences? Probability is very little,but non-zero.

Rare pork? I don't think so. None for me thank you. [grin]

Quote: Original post by Krokhin
This is temporary measure,of couse,and not political.In the time of Clinton and Lavrov meeting The Big Red Button was pressed . Although that button was named "Peregruzka" (i.e. overload),but all the same...we understand and hope that it was reset [smile]

So much for the translators at the State Dept! It was the thought that counted.



@Mith, check this out: Foolish Employment and Health Policies

Quote:
...
What the American failure to mandate employer-paid sick-days means is that most Americans who don’t feel well go to work anyway, in part for fear of losing their jobs, and in part because they are already living so close to the margin that they cannot afford to miss a few days’ pay.

The result of this is that offices, buses, subway cars and elevators in coming weeks will be full of highly infectious people who really should be home trying to recuperate. So even if your employer does offer you sick leave, you will be placed at risk by other employers who do not offer that benefit to their workers, or even by lower-status workers at your own company who don’t get the same sick-pay benefits you do. (At Temple University where my wife works, it was only recently, after a long struggle backed by student activists, that contractor-service guards on the campus received sick pay. Before that, they had to come to work, sick or not, putting students and faculty at risk of infection.)

Add to this the fact that nearly 50 million Americans earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, yet work for employers who don’t provide them with any health insurance. For such people, going to a doctor is a serious problem. They probably don’t have the $50-$100 in cash to pay for an office visit—much less the $200-400 it would cost to bring all four members of a family—and going to an emergency room at a local hospital and asking for charity care for something like flu symptoms could mean a half day in a waiting room (with a lot of other sick people!). Not to mention that many hospitals cheat on their free care provision mandate and then dun patients for $2000 for seeing a nurse-practitioner and getting the advice to take two aspirins and drink a lot of fluid. And then of course, there’s coming up with the money to buy a costly drug like Tamiflu.

Who’s likely to do any that without health insurance?
...

The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous power

Quote:
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The swine flu may prove that the WHO/Centres for Disease Control version of pandemic preparedness – without massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public health, and global access to lifeline drugs – belongs to the same class of Ponzified risk management as Madoff securities. It is not so much that the pandemic warning system has failed as it simply doesn't exist, even in North America and the EU.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political will to monitor livestock diseases, but the situation is hardly better north of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals. Similarly, a decade of urgent warnings by scientists has failed to ensure the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to the countries in the direct path of likely pandemics. Mexico has world-famous disease experts, but it had to send swabs to a Winnipeg lab in order to ID the strain's genome. Almost a week was lost as a consequence.
...
Researchers interviewed by Science worried that one of these hybrids might become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu: an admonition, of course, that went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw away billions on bioterrorism fantasies.
...
Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers
...

Bioclasswarfare!!!

A cause of death of this flu would be Cytokine Storm, where the immune system overreacts. Drinking alcohol and eating sugar would weaken the immune system. So, would doing that help against dying from this flu?

Quote: Original post by Lode
A cause of death of this flu would be Cytokine Storm, where the immune system overreacts. Drinking alcohol and eating sugar would weaken the immune system. So, would doing that help against dying from this flu?

It's worth a shot

hehe
_________________________________________________________________________________

Buy my old PC

Quote: Original post by Lode
A cause of death of this flu would be Cytokine Storm, where the immune system overreacts. Drinking alcohol and eating sugar would weaken the immune system. So, would doing that help against dying from this flu?

Or you could induce a constant state of overtraining. This way you get to keep your liver. [smile]

Quote: Original post by polly

Quote:
Why is the death toll for Mexicans so much higher than Americans from this virus thus far?

My guess is diet. My guess is that Mexicans are slightly more likely to be malnourished than Americans on average, and are therefore more apt to suffer from the infection.

except its the healthy young adults whom are dying, from immune system overreaction, not young/elderly/starved. (and as for death toll being higher, having just dozen or two cases in US, you can hardly say anything at all about it; furthermore, mexica may be biased to analyse all the cases that resulted in death but not all cases that did not result in death) edit: sorry, outdated info. currently 91 cases and one death (of less than 2 years old child), so looks like the death rate is rather low.
Nonetheless, it looks like it is order of magnitude more lethal than seasonal flu, and certainly does deserve more concern and attention than, for example, AIDS.

[Edited by - Dmytry on April 29, 2009 12:26:06 PM]

Quote: Original post by LessBread
I'm just saying that a food scare gets people's attention. Maybe with their ears perked up, they'll get the message to wash hands etc.

Err...seems me they should wash an ears before in order to hear better[smile]
Food is not the most important.Our oldest generation (mostly grammyes who passed through ww2) in case of food panic rushes to buy a solt and matches.Even now,last case was in 1998 after default.

Will I behave differently after hearing about this flu epidemic? Certainly not. Will a well-informed, calmly thinking, intelligent person behave differently? Probably not, either.

This flu epidemic is an almost entirely irrelevant news story. If you are already following common sense, there is essentially nothing you can do to change your own chance of infection - unless you are about to travel into relevant regions. But given that there is so much travel these days that this virus is bound to spread rather quickly anyway, even that is kind of moot.

So while it's nice to know about this, it doesn't really deserve more than a small note in newspapers outside the affected regions. The hype that some people in the media are turning it into is rather disgusting.

Prefect:
well, what do you think news sources should talk about instead? About AIDS? About terrorists, whom kill order of magnitude fewer people than even mildest seasonal flu? Politics? I challenge you to name at least one global event of this week which is more important than new flu (even new mild seasonal flu). I, frankly, can think of none. Even mild seasonal flu kills more people than huge terrorist attack or US invasion of some middle east country, and the loss of productivity from flu is a really huge $ figure, on the order of those bailouts of previous year. When humans land on mars, that event, if news would use your "intelligent" metric of importance, wouldn't deserve even a small note (given its non-existent impact on your life).

BTW, if the time you spend washing hands absolutely does not depend to epidemic situation, you're either washing hands too little or too much.

[Edited by - Dmytry on April 29, 2009 4:13:39 PM]