Worldwide, we’re now looking at a bit over 8,000 cases, and 72 people dead.
Meaning, Swine Flu worldwide is about on a par with deaths by lightning strike in the United States. Of course, we have to look at it worldwide just to make it look close, but I guess you can do that if you want.
Meanwhile, millions will die this year worldwide from common flu. Millions upon millions will die from malaria. Tens of millions will die from other issues including malnutrition, cholera, and more. But it’s good to know all the resources and attention we’re spending on a slightly new variation of a familiar killer. Because, you know, 74 dead worldwide: that’s pretty serious.
I’m sorry to be so sarcastic, but I really wish we’d get our priorities straight when we talk about infectious diseases. But the new and sexy-scary is just so much more interesting to us than the much more dangerous everyday killers. I wonder why that is?
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It’s similar to the case people make against having guns in the house with children. More kids die in bathtub drowning accidents than are by a gun.
I’m with you on this one, Dean – the situation has been WAY overblown and I fear that, eventually, these scares (mad cow, bird flu, sars, et. al.) are going to cause a “boy who cried wolf” effect. When there really IS a dangerous pandemic, no one will listen.
If I remember Balko’s numbers, US police SWAT teams have a higher fatality rate erroneously kicking down the doors of innocents.
But isn’t this really about the collapse of the news? I see scant little difference in poor quality “reportage” whether the topic be Obama, AIDS, WMDs, or the Swine Flu.
I’ve been looking for a new acronym to replace MSM that better describes the continuing decent into banal histrionic mediocrity.
What we’re really watching in action is unionized corporate media.
“UCM” works for me. Cars, public schools, universities, newspapers, hospitals, government bureaus.. why should unionized corporatism be any less pathological declaring itself fit to determine the news?
Ran across this: “The swine H1N1 has an avian PB2, which favors growth at high temperatures (41 C), which will offer a distinct advantage over the summer. As seen in the above numbers, the virus spreads easily, especially among students.”
Wise to not confuse the bug with the reportage. This one has the ability to do some very ugly things. Plus, it looks like this one’s already outpacing the traditional flu and the season is still four months away.
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/05140902/Swine_H1N1_Scotland_6l.html
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/05120903/Swine_H1N1_Seasonal.html
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/05150901/Swine_H1N1_Queens.html
I believe this is an example of knowledge not being power. At any given moment how many unidentified strains or flu are there floating around in the population? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands. And it’s possible that each and every one of them could mutate into something more deadly. If we shut down schools, put people into forcible quarantine (as was done in China), encourage people to go into voluntary quarantine (as was done here), and so on, society will grind to a halt.
There’s got to be a better way of evaluating risk and communicating it to people than was done in this case.
Lots of folks will kick the bucket from just plain good old-fashioned death. Happens every day. Happens every minute. Happens every second. No scare headlines. No wringing of hands in government and media offices. I guess death itself is sort of an ongoing never-to-be stopped pandemic.
I’m trying not to be any more sarcastic than Dean in this post.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The problem, though, is that nobody has found a way to make money of lightning strikes — what are you gonna do, double the budget of the NOAA (if Obama hasn’t already done so….)
With strange new exotic diseases, you can pour research dollars into the NIH and CDC; give grants to pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines, tests and now anti-virals; give bureacrats at 50 state public health agencies something sexy to do for a change….
The pork flu came and went — 1 month of hysteria at Drudge and nothing more.
HB
Yer, right,
Even SF Mayor Gavin Newsom got into the act on May 1st when the SF Health Director confirmed but one case of swine —-check out sentence three:
“Newsom also said he would ask the Board of Supervisors to declare a state of emergency in San Francisco, primarily as a means to request federal funding.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/30/MNSB17C80B.DTL&tsp=1
and if the avian flu crosses with the swine flu, you might see pigs fly
Today the WHO was discussing whether to ditch standard anti-flu measures and go to full-bore concentration of Swine Flu.
Don’t tell me that’s just the press getting hysterical.
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