Aa
FYI: Aporkalypse Now
The other thread got too long to load so I am posting this on it's own. Maybe it will help calm some fears at last.
Ben Sherwood: Hogwash Alert: How to Survive the Pandemic of Swine Flu Scams and Swindles
Long before you'd ever come down with swine flu, you'll be exposed to another kind of virus sweeping the world: A global outbreak of online scams preying on your fears of the so-called aporkalypse.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-sherwood/hogwash-alert-how-to-prot_b_195226.html
Ben Sherwood: Hogwash Alert: How to Survive the Pandemic of Swine Flu Scams and Swindles
Long before you'd ever come down with swine flu, you'll be exposed to another kind of virus sweeping the world: A global outbreak of online scams preying on your fears of the so-called aporkalypse.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-sherwood/hogwash-alert-how-to-prot_b_195226.html
More people die from eating big macs and having heart attacks than any swine flu...and leta not forget tobacco...alcohol,.how bout all the deaths and tramaa from this...and its legal...more people die from hospital mistakes too than any flu...thie world hasnt gone mad......its been mad since day 0ne
My daughter didn't think it was funny at all when I started talking to her in Pig Latin.
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LOL. Priceless.
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LOL. Priceless.
Ok...now I have amy own Swine Flu tale to tell. My daughter calls from Orlando (where there was 1 case reported) at 3 in the morning with a fever of 102.6. So I come down to do the Mom-thing. I head home that night. Then she calls at 5 am the next morning-this time with nasuea (sp) and all that fun stuff. I head back down and take her to the student health center.
Everything was fine until the strep test came back negative. Then they asked us to enjoy the "relaxation" room. (by relaxation, I mean isolated-they weren't fooling me)) So, in about 5 minutes I go from the one with no concerns whatsoever about this thing...to thinking I am about to be a headline, lol! My daughter didn't think it was funny at all when I started talking to her in Pig Latin. She didn't appreciate the offer of Peg either...I have a spare with me, lol!!
Fortunately, the kiddo is negative for influenza viruses...but just goes to show-Yikes!
Hat-tay is y-may tory-say.
Everything was fine until the strep test came back negative. Then they asked us to enjoy the "relaxation" room. (by relaxation, I mean isolated-they weren't fooling me)) So, in about 5 minutes I go from the one with no concerns whatsoever about this thing...to thinking I am about to be a headline, lol! My daughter didn't think it was funny at all when I started talking to her in Pig Latin. She didn't appreciate the offer of Peg either...I have a spare with me, lol!!
Fortunately, the kiddo is negative for influenza viruses...but just goes to show-Yikes!
Hat-tay is y-may tory-say.
kinda scary that our city was sold out of masks and hand sanitizer since a week ago.
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The question remains how can a single college student afford to buy out an entire city's supply of masks and sanitizers?
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The question remains how can a single college student afford to buy out an entire city's supply of masks and sanitizers?
kinda scary that our city was sold out of masks and hand sanitizer since a week ago. people are still afraid of being in public. but i still go to school and take my tests for the most part, keep hand sanitizer with me wherever i go and have a mask in my backpack just in case.
Hate to say it but in the past when you hit 200 posts it starts a new page from post #201 and makes it much easier to load.
You would think after five or six years I would know this? Amazing how little I know about how this site functions!
I just thought it was the perfect article to remind people - just like with Hepc there ARE people out there who are going to try to make a buck or two.........and they suck! ;)
I live now in CT where I work but I happened to be working in the city the day the plane was there when Sflu just came out!
You would think after five or six years I would know this? Amazing how little I know about how this site functions!
I just thought it was the perfect article to remind people - just like with Hepc there ARE people out there who are going to try to make a buck or two.........and they suck! ;)
I live now in CT where I work but I happened to be working in the city the day the plane was there when Sflu just came out!
this article is from a friend
The New York Times
Published: April 30, 2009
Mexico’s Fast Diagnosis
By JULIO FRENK
EVERY year approximately 10,000 Mexicans die from the effects of seasonal flu. Usually they are the elderly and the very young, people whose immune systems are not robust enough to fight off the virus. But this year has been different. The Mexican disease surveillance system, a network of more than 11,000 hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices, picked up a minor but troubling trend in April. Across this nation of 110 million people, a handful of young adults had apparently died from influenza. An immediate investigation led, within a few hectic weeks, to the isolation and full genetic sequencing of the microbe causing the illness. The experts’ worst fear was confirmed: it was a new kind of influenza virus.
Some have complained that the Mexican government did not act fast enough to identify this new bug and sound the alarm. But such criticism fails to take into account the real-life complexity of recognizing and responding to an unexpected public health emergency.
As a former minister of health for Mexico, I met with Mexican officials this week to consult with them on their response to the influenza, and I was impressed by how medical scientists in the country quickly perceived the unusual trend of illness against a background of standard flu and then analyzed the virus and alerted global health authorities. Their fast action gave other countries the warning they needed to screen for the new virus, which is why cases of swine flu have already been discovered in a dozen other countries — cases that might otherwise have long gone unnoticed.
The number of confirmed deaths in Mexico from this new virus is still uncertain and may be only several score. Further epidemiologic detective work will tell us whether the virus had been circulating throughout the seasonal flu period in Mexico, beginning as early as last fall, making thousands only mildly ill, and alerting us to its presence only with the unexpected deaths of young adults.
From the moment this so-called swine flu was identified, the Mexican government worked vigorously to contain the contagion — closing all schools across the country, limiting public gatherings and instructing people to wear masks and refrain from greetings involving physical contact. President Felipe Calderón himself led the response, underlining the seriousness of the situation, and that may explain why so many Mexicans have complied. Already, the number of deaths seems to be stabilizing, perhaps indicating that the first wave of this influenza has peaked.
It’s still not known why this flu seems to have been deadly only in Mexico. It stands to reason that for the entire winter flu season, Mexican doctors, not knowing that a new virus was afoot, saw any instances of it as ordinary seasonal flu, and thus did not give patients the antiviral drugs that could have saved their lives. These medicines are effective only if given within 48 hours of the onset of symptoms.
Like many other countries, Mexico had been preparing for an outbreak like this. The deadly 2003 epidemic of SARS and the 2005 outbreak of avian flu taught the world to expect that another microbial agent from animals would one day again infect humans. Over the past six years, Mexico bolstered its disease surveillance systems, built up public health laboratories, cooperated in developing international networks for information sharing and devised response plans. At the same time, the international community was stockpiling antiviral drugs, and scientists were improving their ability to understand new viruses. Most important, the World Health Organization’s International Health Regulations were written to hold countries accountable for monitoring disease outbreaks, publicly reporting all information and cooperating with other countries.
Since the 1980s, Mexico has been strengthening its epidemiologic intelligence service, in cooperation with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hundreds of Mexican doctors and other health professionals have received advanced training in epidemiology. In recent years, Mexico has worked with Canada, Japan, the United States and several European countries to establish the Global Health Security Action Group, a tight public health communications network. Unknown to most people, an army of epidemiologists operates around the clock to defend against microbial threats. Whether this system might have worked even more quickly in the present outbreak can be examined later; for now we must move forward with the knowledge we have in hand.
We don’t have a lot of time. Viruses are sensitive to seasonal temperature change, and this one, like the 1918 influenza, may reappear more robustly in the fall. It is critical to ascertain, from blood tests, the true number of swine flu cases worldwide, both mild and severe. Also, a sound epidemic curve needs to be established, which would reveal how the virus blossomed outward from initial cases and make it possible to quantify its transmissibility. And while we wait as much as six months for a vaccine to be readied, we need to pinpoint the best treatment strategies.
Sadly, it takes a cluster of casualties to alert the world that humans are once more under attack and that we need to marshal our scientific forces. This is, as it must be, a global challenge. With international cooperation, we have reason to hope that casualties will be fewer in this outbreak than they were in the last one, and fewer still when the inevitable next virus arises.
Julio Frenk, Mexico’s minister of health from 2000 to 2006, is the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health.
The New York Times
Published: April 30, 2009
Mexico’s Fast Diagnosis
By JULIO FRENK
EVERY year approximately 10,000 Mexicans die from the effects of seasonal flu. Usually they are the elderly and the very young, people whose immune systems are not robust enough to fight off the virus. But this year has been different. The Mexican disease surveillance system, a network of more than 11,000 hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices, picked up a minor but troubling trend in April. Across this nation of 110 million people, a handful of young adults had apparently died from influenza. An immediate investigation led, within a few hectic weeks, to the isolation and full genetic sequencing of the microbe causing the illness. The experts’ worst fear was confirmed: it was a new kind of influenza virus.
Some have complained that the Mexican government did not act fast enough to identify this new bug and sound the alarm. But such criticism fails to take into account the real-life complexity of recognizing and responding to an unexpected public health emergency.
As a former minister of health for Mexico, I met with Mexican officials this week to consult with them on their response to the influenza, and I was impressed by how medical scientists in the country quickly perceived the unusual trend of illness against a background of standard flu and then analyzed the virus and alerted global health authorities. Their fast action gave other countries the warning they needed to screen for the new virus, which is why cases of swine flu have already been discovered in a dozen other countries — cases that might otherwise have long gone unnoticed.
The number of confirmed deaths in Mexico from this new virus is still uncertain and may be only several score. Further epidemiologic detective work will tell us whether the virus had been circulating throughout the seasonal flu period in Mexico, beginning as early as last fall, making thousands only mildly ill, and alerting us to its presence only with the unexpected deaths of young adults.
From the moment this so-called swine flu was identified, the Mexican government worked vigorously to contain the contagion — closing all schools across the country, limiting public gatherings and instructing people to wear masks and refrain from greetings involving physical contact. President Felipe Calderón himself led the response, underlining the seriousness of the situation, and that may explain why so many Mexicans have complied. Already, the number of deaths seems to be stabilizing, perhaps indicating that the first wave of this influenza has peaked.
It’s still not known why this flu seems to have been deadly only in Mexico. It stands to reason that for the entire winter flu season, Mexican doctors, not knowing that a new virus was afoot, saw any instances of it as ordinary seasonal flu, and thus did not give patients the antiviral drugs that could have saved their lives. These medicines are effective only if given within 48 hours of the onset of symptoms.
Like many other countries, Mexico had been preparing for an outbreak like this. The deadly 2003 epidemic of SARS and the 2005 outbreak of avian flu taught the world to expect that another microbial agent from animals would one day again infect humans. Over the past six years, Mexico bolstered its disease surveillance systems, built up public health laboratories, cooperated in developing international networks for information sharing and devised response plans. At the same time, the international community was stockpiling antiviral drugs, and scientists were improving their ability to understand new viruses. Most important, the World Health Organization’s International Health Regulations were written to hold countries accountable for monitoring disease outbreaks, publicly reporting all information and cooperating with other countries.
Since the 1980s, Mexico has been strengthening its epidemiologic intelligence service, in cooperation with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hundreds of Mexican doctors and other health professionals have received advanced training in epidemiology. In recent years, Mexico has worked with Canada, Japan, the United States and several European countries to establish the Global Health Security Action Group, a tight public health communications network. Unknown to most people, an army of epidemiologists operates around the clock to defend against microbial threats. Whether this system might have worked even more quickly in the present outbreak can be examined later; for now we must move forward with the knowledge we have in hand.
We don’t have a lot of time. Viruses are sensitive to seasonal temperature change, and this one, like the 1918 influenza, may reappear more robustly in the fall. It is critical to ascertain, from blood tests, the true number of swine flu cases worldwide, both mild and severe. Also, a sound epidemic curve needs to be established, which would reveal how the virus blossomed outward from initial cases and make it possible to quantify its transmissibility. And while we wait as much as six months for a vaccine to be readied, we need to pinpoint the best treatment strategies.
Sadly, it takes a cluster of casualties to alert the world that humans are once more under attack and that we need to marshal our scientific forces. This is, as it must be, a global challenge. With international cooperation, we have reason to hope that casualties will be fewer in this outbreak than they were in the last one, and fewer still when the inevitable next virus arises.
Julio Frenk, Mexico’s minister of health from 2000 to 2006, is the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health.
Hate to say it but in the past when you hit 200 posts it starts a new page from post #201 and makes it much easier to load.
So...... you are still alive in NY? You've had swine flu AND "drive bys" with big planes in Manhattan recently eh? Fortunately New Yorkers are used to chaos.
Love the title by the way.....
Willy
So...... you are still alive in NY? You've had swine flu AND "drive bys" with big planes in Manhattan recently eh? Fortunately New Yorkers are used to chaos.
Love the title by the way.....
Willy
Hahahahaha, great post. Lots of folks will get rich selling snake oil to people who panic at the suggestion of swine flu. Tamiflu is SO expensive and it will not prevent the flu, just shorten its duration by a maximum 36 hours, and it has some really serious potential side effects. Who knows what other scams are hatching out there!
Good article, thanks for posting.
jd
Good article, thanks for posting.
jd
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