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Author Topic: The swine flu
Valentine014
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Looks like it made it to Omaha via California. Link.
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Noemon
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CT, I'm curious to know how concerned you are about this. After reading that New Scientist article, I'd classify myself as interested, but only slightly concerned (down from mildly worried before reading it).

Something that I don't think is addressed in the article (though maybe it was--I'm operating on far too little sleep here, and it's possible my memory is off) is that even in Mexico, where the mortality rate for this virus seems to be startlingly high, the number of reported cases is probably only a fraction of the total number of people infected. If I get the flu, I don't bother going to my doctor for it, because there really isn't a whole lot that they can do for me. Instead, I just stay home and wait it out. Only if my symptoms intensified to the point that the were scaring me would I bother going to the doctor.

Assuming that I'm not abnormal in this, it seems reasonable to think that the high percentage isn't as high as people think--yes, a high percentage of people with symptoms bad enough to seek physician assistance are dying in Mexico, but the people going to the doctor for this probably represent a fairly small percentage of the infected population. Of course, it's entirely possible that epidemiologists control for this sort of thing when making their estimates (maui babe? Any input?).

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Belle
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Noemon I think you're absolutely right, but the big concern for me is not getting the flu and dying, but rather the social and economic impact that can come from a large percentage of the population being sick at one time. If only 20% of the firefighters in the city of Birmingham were out sick, it would cripple emergency services in the town. I'm sure that is not unique to Birmingham, but would be the case in any large city.

You would see deaths, not necessarily from swine flu, but from other problems because emergency services can't respond effectively. And, if the emergency rooms are clogged with people panicking because they have the sniffles (or even if they have a mild case of the flu) then the doctors and nurses there can't respond as quickly or as well to true emergencies. Millions of people get sick or injured every day with or without swine flu, and we need our resources from emergency services and hospitals to care for those people. If they're tied up either responding to swine flu, or if they are sick themselves, it makes things much harder.

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Christine
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I'm really struggling to get some perspective here. A big part of me feels like this is just another might-happen that the news is blowing way out of proportion. in effect, "crying wolf." On the other hand, there are definitely some credible medical agencies raising some warning flags here. So yeah, there's a new flu going around. A few people are getting sick, most of them seem to be recovering. I don't want to sound cold about it, but the death toll really doesn't strike me as being particularly frightening.

So, what is possible and what is LIKELY?

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Kwea
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Noemon, the issues is what has been reported. The actual amount of people infected is more than likely MUCH higher than what is being reported. If that is true (and it looks like it is) then the over all mortality rate isn't nearly as high as what is currently being reported.

Data collection is still being done, but I imagine we will see a decrease in the mortality rate now that it is in the US.

One of the concerns is also that it seems to be attacking (and killing) otherwise healthy people, which is atypical of flus. I think that we will also see that change( and it already is starting to), because one again it is a data collection error. Most of these cases are not being reported, and we are starting to receive reports of a number of milder cases that people survived.


Also, as the SF spreads, I imagine we will see it begin to grow in the typical "at risk" population. Right now those populations have been limited in their exposure (young children, elder people and people with compromised immune systems) compared to a normal flu virus. This will lower the infection rate of healthier populations, but may cause more fatalities. Right now we are seeing a disproportionate percent of healthier people being sick, but this will change.


It is POSSIBLE (but not probable) that this could mutate, and because a huge issue. What is likely is that this will be a bad flu, and possibly spread, but the mortality rate will even out, and if you are a healthy person who takes reasonable precautions(HAND WASH PEOPLE, 10-15 times a day....skip the masks and wash your hands!!!) you should be fine.

There will be social repercussions, and our economy will probably take another hit, but in the end we will probably be fine.

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aspectre
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"...Egypt has ordered the destruction of all pigs."

Aporkalypse Now: "Not to have a negative effect on our [pork] industry, we decided to call it 'novel flu' from now on," European Union Health Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou said yesterday.

Book burnings to follow in order to prevent page-to-human transmission.

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CaySedai
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In Iowa, at least one TV station is referring to it at H1N1 flu instead of swine flu. Iowa is the top pork producing state (according to the Iowa Pork Producers website).

Maybe the government - or the Iowa Pork Producers - could run a contest for a catchier name that doesn't doesn't involve pork.

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jebus202
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Pork Flu?

Pig Flu?

Ham Flu?

Bacon Flu?

Don't-Eat-It-if-It-Has-a-Snout-and-Hooves Flu? (Handily shortened to DEIIHSH Flu)

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BlackBlade
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Well since it's a combination of pig, bird, and human strains why can't we just call it the "mystery meat flu?"
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Noemon
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Belle, that's interesting; I hadn't considered that angle.

quote:
Originally posted by Kwea:
[QB] Noemon, the issues is what has been reported. The actual amount of people infected is more than likely MUCH higher than what is being reported. If that is true (and it looks like it is) then the over all mortality rate isn't nearly as high as what is currently being reported.

Yes, that's what I was saying. Or, you know, trying to say. I'm a bit of a zombie today, so it's entirely possible that I was less than clear.

As for coming up with a catchy name, it's too bad that term "chimera" is already used in medicine. If it weren't, it would be a good popular name for this one.

[Edit - how about "manticore flu"]

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Mucus
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quote:
Originally posted by CaySedai:
Maybe the government - or the Iowa Pork Producers - could run a contest for a catchier name that doesn't doesn't involve pork.

They kinda have a point.

During the Spanish flu epidemic, I really cut back on eating Spanish people.

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Ron Lambert
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In keeping with your suggestion, BlackBlade, how about "Spam Flu"?

Oh wait--then all the grocery stores would have to pull their cans of Spam off the shelves.

Jebus202--if we kill all the humans, then there would no longer be any urgency for developing a vaccine. It might save the pigs, though. And the birds.

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Mama Squirrel
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Two schools in Oxnard close due to SF
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jebus202
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quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
Jebus202--if we kill all the humans, then there would no longer be any urgency for developing a vaccine. It might save the pigs, though. And the birds.

Damn it, I knew there was a flaw in the plan.
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Tatiana
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See, the difference between pandemic flu and regular flu seasons is that in regular years, only a small fraction of people even get sick, and a small fraction of those die. In pandemics, a much larger fraction of people get sick all at once (within a 2 or 3 week period) and so they cause outages of normal services of societies, like filling grocery store shelves, keeping the power on, etc. So society is very stressed to be able to keep things going. With our new just-in-time global economy, nobody really has any idea how bad things might be. The last bad flu pandemic was in 1918 when the population was much less and global interdependence was much lower.

So there really is reason for concern. Not so you spend your days in dread, but enough that you realize that it just makes sense to be prepared.

Important ways to be prepared are

1) knowing what to expect so you don't panic and add to the problem. For instance, no groups or organizations, no matter how fearful and hated, did this on purpose. Pandemic flu is a recurring feature of human history.

2) Having supplies of food and water on hand so you can feed your family for several weeks even if grocery stores shelves are empty, power goes off, water goes off, natural gas goes off, other services are unavailable, etc. Hopefully those won't happen, but if half to 2/3 of your workforce didn't show up today, how much of your regular work could you manage to cover? Realize that's true for all sectors of our economy.

3) Knowing to check on relatives, neighbors, the elderly, and make sure everyone is cared for. Wear a good face mask if you're afraid of contagion, but don't let people die for want of simple things you can help them with like water or crackers.

4) So far they're holding up fine, but during a bad pandemic, health care facilities are swamped and can't possibly take care of everyone. Health care workers tend to get infected more than others, since they obviously get exposed to more. Emergency workers as well. So people may have to fend for themselves, or get kicked out of the hospital to make room for people much sicker. Another approach the hospitals might take is to turn away anyone else who comes after they fill up. They'll be working round the clock, stressed, fatigued, and traumatized by all the deaths, so don't try to argue with them. The hospital might be more dangerous a place than our homes for those few weeks while the wave passes.

5) Again, we can hope that the death rate is very low from this strain. Things very well might not get this bad. We've been preparing for an H5N1 pandemic for a while, and those preparations should help. But at the very least it looks like a lot of people will come down ill at once. So don't panic, know what to do, be prepared.

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BlackBlade
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Park City Utah schools close til May 4th.

We had one suspected walk in at the clinic I work at actually.

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aspectre
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Ground Zero

Edit: Sometime between when I originally posted a link to the picture and now, a highly-probable malware site (country origin .ru) was inserted into the RandomFunnyPhoto page. ie Clicking on the link to that particular RandomFunnyPhoto causes an automatic link redirect that does insert an executable file without asking for permission.....and without changing the appearance of the page.

I replaced that particular link with what I think is one to a safe webpage.
But definitely do NOT use the RandomFunnyPhoto link if you've bookmarked it.

[ September 20, 2009, 04:05 PM: Message edited by: aspectre ]

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Tatiana
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Lol, aspectre!
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ludosti
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Well, with 4 confirmed cases here in AZ already, things will likely get interesting. My husband (who works in the IT department for a large national financial company) has had to prepare computers today for employees to take home in case of a large outbreak. My biggest concern is for my mother, who is immune-compromised. Between it and some of her other physical issues, she doesn't normally come into contact with many people, but things like this make me a little nervous for her.
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ClaudiaTherese
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Noeman, my personal (and unscientific but frank) belief is that we've already had swine flu travelling around the US and Canada for the last few months. I think it's likely that Mexico does have an underreporting problem, and (I think) odds are we'll mostly make it through just fine.

But. But. We just do not know. I don't think anyone has any reasonable way of predicting "how likely" at this point. It's a "may be, may not be, will have to wait and see, so best to be prepared" sort of thing.

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CaySedai
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I had wanted to suggest "zombie flu" in response to someone's post (Noemon, on second page) about zombies. Lo and behold: "zombism".
















I wish we had spoiler text coverup on this site. It's a very clever page - mimics the BBC page and the links go back to the original BBC site.

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Tatiana
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http://www.providentliving.org/pfw/multimedia/files/pfw/pdf/112086_PPHomeFamilyPrepardness_pdf.pdf Here's an excellent flu preparedness sheet from the LDS church.
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LargeTuna
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Hey everyone here's a great site that lets you know if you have the swine Flu or just the common cold [Wink] It's pretty cool

http://doihaveswineflu.org/

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Tatiana
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Here's the best preparedness site I've seen. This is the preparation level at which we all should be. I don't know about you but I've got a way to go. [Smile]

http://www.getpandemicready.org/

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Tatiana
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I just listened to the WHO daily press briefing from today and the WHO scientist on one occasion referred to it as "this pandemic". I thought that was interesting that he didn't say this potential pandemic or this impending pandemic but just this pandemic. It seems they are fully expecting to go to stage 6 any time.
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maui babe
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They pretty much are expecting to up the level to 6 very soon (the last report I heard was that it would go up within 24 hours)... but it's based on global spread, not on virulence or severity of the illness.

By definition, this IS a pandemic. It just doesn't seem to be an especially virulent one (outside of Mexico City anyway, and we're not even sure about that, cuz we're not sure exactly how they're counting cases).

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Tatiana
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What another WHO scientist said is that the 1918 flu was very mild at first. That there is no way to tell from these first cases how mild or virulent it will end up being.
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Tatiana
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Another interesting thing I found, video of a symposium on pandemic flu from 2006. Of course they assumed an H5N1 pandemic, but the conclusions they draw would apply to any severe pandemic.

http://www.scribemedia.org/2006/11/22/avian-flu/

The whole thing is like 2 hours long or something but it's really fascinating, or is to me.

Here we have this tremendous problem for society, and it has the potential to cause many deaths, and much trauma to those who survive, it can deal death-blows to any systems upon which we depend to survive in our society, if they are too delicate or too vulnerable. The big take-home lesson of all this is ...

we are on our own

we're going to have to learn self-reliance to get through this. All our support systems, the government, the hospitals, the ambulance drivers and EMTs, the grocery stores, the utilities, the gas stations, all of those things could go away, and we would be left to fend for ourselves, as the victims of Hurricane Katrina had to fend for themselves, but not just for a week but possibly for up to 12 weeks.

The thing we need more than anything else is people who are resilient, prepared, determined, and able to take care of themselves. Those types of people will be the leaders who can get their communities through a severe pandemic, whenever it comes. We need a lot of people like that. I hope all hatrackers will be among them.

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Ron Lambert
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Some health authorities I have heard on the media say that we are not into the regular flu season yet, which is one of the unusual things about this current outbreak. But once we do enter the regular flu season, many will think that any case of flu is H1N1 (Swine, Mexico, Babe). So as far as public hysteria is concerned, we are not out of the woods yet.
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Ron Lambert
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I just had another possible name for the current flu occur to me. We could call it "Mayo Flu." Which could give a whole new meaning to the Cinco de Mayo holiday. The Mayo Clinic probably would not mind the extra publicity. Sales of mayonnaise might be depressed for a while, though.
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Ron Lambert
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Hmmm--I just did a little research on my favorite "Sinko de Mayo" joke. I was surprised to find it made its way to Snopes. Here is the link: http://www.snopes.com/humor/jokes/sinkomayo.asp

I am sure I was not the first to tell it, but I know I was telling this joke prior to 1997.

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Tatiana
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http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/ Here's a good and fairly brief overview of the 1918 flu. This is what a bad pandemic is like during a time when the population is much smaller, the world is much less interdependent, and our local economies were not run on just-in-time principles. So here's a bad one. Hopefully this one will be a mild one.

The thing is, nobody knows. There's not anyone on earth who can tell you at this point if this will be mild or bad. If it's bad, it can be bad in whole new ways that we've never before experienced, because of the way society has changed in the meantime to a form that happens to be much more vulnerable to flu-like infectious diseases.

Again, I'm not trying to scare people for no reason. I'm trying to motivate people to prepare, I'm trying to educate them about how things will be, and I'm trying to encourage them to be strong, self-reliant, and capable in emergencies and disasters.

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Audeo
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To put this new pandemic into perspective a little, I found a pubmed article (DOI citation doi:10.1016/j.vaccine.2007.03.46) that discusses the epidemiology of the 'seasonal flu' which is a mix of several subtypes that commonly infect humans. In the 1990's the US had an annual average of 36,000 deaths from influenza and 200,000 hospitalizations. The study doesn't give a number of total cases, but it must be well in excess of 200,000 people. Of course the deaths (over 60%) were mainly in people over 65 with deaths in children between 5-17 being so rare that they didn't have enough data to extrapolate the frequency.

So the newest strain of A H1N1 is still relatively small in terms of epidemiological impact. However, it is the nearing the end of the flu season and the virus may smolder over the summer only infecting a small number of people only to resurge in the fall and become a more severe problem. The fear of this was the reason for a wide spread flu vaccine program in the 1970's. The result was that the virus never spread like feared, and the morbidity and mortality as a direct result of vaccination was greater than that of the actual disease. Of course I wonder if the reason it never took off in the fall was because there was such a great vaccination program, but politicians and epidemiologists of the day were lambasted for overreacting.

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Bella Bee
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I take it back. Pigs may be a problem after all.
Man infects pigs.

I still think that most people are likely to socialise with more humans than pigs, though.

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aspectre
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Okay, the people whose main concern about SwineFlu was whether they'd close the theaters before StarTrek's opening weekend, raise your hands.
[Wave]
It would be ironic if this minor outbreak turns into a pandemic because of this coming weekend's packed theaters.

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Darth_Mauve
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Those pesky viruses, wishing to, "Boldly go where no man has gone before--your lungs."

Or maybe, "To Boldly go into a man where no Swine derived virus has gone before."

The new name, "The Romulan Flu--insuring only it lives long and prospers".

I can see the post-mortem now. "The CDC reports that the virus was spread and strengthened due mostly to it being shared during the "Star Trek" weekend. It could have been stopped if the authorities had taken faster action, but since the Trekkies were the first to go, no one really noticed. Even those who saw a sick Trekkie--pale, glazed eyes, feverish, could not tell them from normal Trekkies."

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Ron Lambert
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Klingon!

But even if they do close the theatres, eventually the movie will come out on DVD.

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Ron Lambert
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According to the Encyclopedia Galactica, Mauves are an alien species with three sexes that are entered into sequentially by one individual, first as the "sire" stage, then as the "wife" stage, then as the "incubator" stage. Sadly, if something goes haywire and a Mauve spends too long in the wife stage, eventually he/she/it bursts into flame and turns to ash. Hence the admonitory slogan known to all the Mauves--"Wive long and phosphor!"
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Tatiana
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uuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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aspectre
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So are you ready to go see StarTrek?

[ February 14, 2010, 11:46 PM: Message edited by: aspectre ]

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Tatiana
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Haha, great idea! And you'll totally fit in, too. People will just think you're in costume.
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Tatiana
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The numbers continue to increase in a way that looks exponential, but will obviously turn into an S-shaped curve (sorry, I forgot the cool mathematical word for that) eventually. On this site, ignore the map, which isn't helpful at the moment, but notice the graph below it of cases day by day. It's not looking so good. At least for now the mortality rate is low. I guess that's the bright side. And if it comes back in more virulent form in the fall, all the people who get the milder form now will be immune, most likely. So it will be interesting to see what happens.

Edit: sigmoidal

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Tatiana
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The WHO declared pandemic phase 6 today. Don't quit taking precautions.

quote:
The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic.

We are in the earliest days of the pandemic. The virus is spreading under a close and careful watch.

No previous pandemic has been detected so early or watched so closely, in real-time, right at the very beginning. The world can now reap the benefits of investments, over the last five years, in pandemic preparedness.

...

A characteristic feature of pandemics is their rapid spread to all parts of the world. In the previous century, this spread has typically taken around 6 to 9 months, even during times when most international travel was by ship or rail.

Countries should prepare to see cases, or the further spread of cases, in the near future. Countries where outbreaks appear to have peaked should prepare for a second wave of infection.

...

We are all in this together, and we will all get through this, together.

Unfortunately, not all, but hopefully most.
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fugu13
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That is, except the precautions that become useless in a pandemic. For instance, air travel to any particular location is nothing to avoid; the flu will be everywhere but the most remote locations.
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The Pixiest
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*yawn* wake me up when everyone is dead and I can move to Boulder.
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Ron Lambert
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I think the best precaution (besides getting enough sleep so that your immune system does not get run down) is to take lots of garlic tablets. The Allycin in garlic is said to have both antibacterial and antiviral properties. Odor-free tablets are commonly available. You will have to experiment to see what dosage works best for you. I take eight capsules per day, of the kind sold by CVS Pharmacy. With that I also take 2.5 grams of vitamin C daily (in the form of ascorbic acid), and I chew up several Rolaids tablets with them, to avoid too much acidity in my stomache. I prefer Rolaids because it also has a balanced amount of magnesium with the calcium. I have had no colds or flu in years.
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Samprimary
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1. Allicin in garlic has no antiviral properties. Garlic won't have had anything to do with you avoiding colds or flu.

2. Are you saying that you take several rolaids tablets, preemptively, daily? This is a quick ticket to having kidney stones and it is a poor way to handle gerd.

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Samprimary
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quote:
Originally posted by The Pixiest:
*yawn* wake me up when everyone is dead and I can move to Boulder.

I was here first.
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aspectre
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Whoops. Maybe killing pigs wasn't such a bright idea after all.
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Samprimary
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hahahahaha.

yeah Cairo is one of those nations whose governmental systems and degrees of corruption give a real sense of perspective to our own. Them and Italy.

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