I was gonna post last night, after a remonstrate to someone, anyways heres the jist
20million in mexico city (crap name btw) ~150 or whatevr deaths
now in nz 3 ppl infected from a trip there (perhaps now ~1,000 kiwis in that country)
ok u have offchances etc but the thing that strikes me is logically the number of cases should be far higher in MC, ok death vs infected but still ...

personally I think the disease is a nonevent (though makes interesting reporting)

coincidentily (day off)
just start watching (I got this out before the swineflu started)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0483607/
by the creator of the best horror/ perhaps the best film of the last decade(the descent)
it starts off with a worldwide virus pandemic from scotland in april2008 :)

look like standard pandemic (everyone turns into zombies leading to general mayhem + mindless slaughter) film

[Edited by - zedz on April 29, 2009 8:48:36 PM]

The WHO doesn't consider it a non-event- it raises pandemic alert to second-highest level.

Quote: Original post by Marmin
The WHO doesn't consider it a non-event- it raises pandemic alert to second-highest level.

...And it's going to be level 6, mark my words. This will turn ugly. All those who brushed it off as a common cold or media hype are going to feel stupid.

This story cracks me up. First of all it is important for the following reasons:
- It has never been seen before so we have no immunity to it and
- It travelled fairly rapidly and is certainly now transmitted human to human

But the fact still remains that its just a cold/flu that is spreading. I feel there is not enough coverage of people that have tested positive and the effects they are feeling. Its been about a week now so are the first people infected now getting healthy? At this point some of the people that were infected should now be 100% again or very clsoe to it.

This story should def get coverage but its so blatantly obvious fear mongering. That scares me A LOT more than the actual swine flu. The fact that our media feeds this beast and the masses listen. Shows how much we think for ourselves sometimes (myself included as at the onset I was rather concerned until I stepped back and thought about it).

The key here is the rapid spread and no immunity. If this had a serious fatality rate, we'd be in DEEP DEEP sh*t. But instead you just get a cold/flu and with proper treatment this is a non issue.

On a side note, I had been wondering since it is late in the flu season and the weather will be on our side, in addition to the fact that it seems to be nonfatal, wouldn’t this be a good time to get it so that you build an immunity to it? Just a thought, am I totally wrong on this?

I think it's pretty silly. Tens of thousands die every year in the US alone from the regular garden-variety flu. Now people throw around numbers of deaths in the hundreds, but if you read closely, the grand total confirmed deaths from this "pandemic" is 8.

8.

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
I think it's pretty silly. Tens of thousands die every year in the US alone from the regular garden-variety flu. Now people throw around numbers of deaths in the hundreds, but if you read closely, the grand total confirmed deaths from this "pandemic" is 8.

8.

Do you even know what the word "pandemic" means?

BeanDog:
amazing fact: there been time at the dawn of 1918 flu epidemic when it has killed only 8 people. BTW, 8 is the WHO's certainly confirmed cases; based on available data WHO suspects lot more deaths, hence the alert level.

If you wanna rant that WHO don't know shit about disease outbreaks, then go on, be the human ostrich (btw ostrich never buries head in sand when in danger; only humans are prone to that sort of behaviour).

Quote: Original post by kryat

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
I think it's pretty silly. Tens of thousands die every year in the US alone from the regular garden-variety flu. Now people throw around numbers of deaths in the hundreds, but if you read closely, the grand total confirmed deaths from this "pandemic" is 8.

8.

Do you even know what the word "pandemic" means?

Quote: Original post by Google
Definitions of pandemic on the Web:

* epidemic over a wide geographical area; "a pandemic outbreak of malaria"
* an epidemic that is geographically widespread; occurring throughout a region or even throughout the world
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Quote: Original post by Google
Definitions of epidemic on the Web:

* a disease affecting a large number of individuals within a population, community, or region at the same time.
www.bcm.edu/molvir/eidbt/eidbt-mvm-glos.htm

Sounds like a pandemic is a particularly large and widespread epidemic, which is a disease affecting a large number of individuals.

I guess we'll know pretty soon if this qualifies. If you look at the death rates per 1000 in major cities worldwide during the 1918 flu, you'll see that the pandemic raised total death rates to 3-8 times their normal levels within a few weeks of the outbreak:


When I see a chart like that, I'll consider the comparison valid. Hopefully that won't happen, and all the measures being put into place will help contain this outbreak. In the meantime, a few hundred cases of an unusual flu that appears relatively mild and the handful of deaths that brought our attention to it do not qualify as a pandemic.

Edit: To clarify, I'm glad that the WHO and other similar organizations are taking this seriously and investigating. I just think it's ridiculous that the popular media are fear-mongering this to an outrageous extent just because not much else interesting is happening right now.

This strain is new and it's spread to many countries. That spread alone qualifies this strain as a pandemic. A pandemic does not become an epidemic until people start getting sick at higher rates.

The news media likes flu stories because the flu can affect everyone and that makes for sensationalism and headline grabbing attention getters. It's cheap and easy to stick a doctor in front of a camera in a studio. Magnified images of microscopic pathogens lets news personalities posture as experts. Etc, etc.

Meanwhile, the UAW is on track to become the owner of Chrysler and possibly GM, which would be a major historical development in the United States, but the corporate news media has gotten sick with the flu and died...

Dmytry: We had a local outbreak of measles here not so long ago. You know, an actual non-trivial disease that apparently affected several dozen people on campus. Call me again when this flu thing reaches this kind of relevance.

Of course the flu thing should be reported, and of course the WHO should worry about it. That is their job. My job is something else, and the same is true for 99.9% of the population. So I'm not going to worry until things are getting more concrete, and I would advise the same kind of behaviour to other non-specialists. My comment about the media reports is to be seen in that light of not "shouting fire in a crowded theater", as the saying goes.

After all, uninformed scares in the general population can actually make this kind of thing worse. I remember my father (who works at a pharmaceutical company) saying back during one of the earlier flu scares that they would run into trouble if people started hoarding flu medication just before a *real* epidemic, because it would make getting help to the right people - meaning those who need it - more difficult. (Of course, said pharmaceutical company would have been more than happy to reap the profits, but that doesn't make the underlying problem go away.)