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Overdone Flu Panic
All this news about the 'pandemic' swine flu seems overdone. But it is of cause a pretty sensational issue that has the benefit to distract from the U.S. torture debate.
A good update on the real situation can be glanced through this twitter feed.
There seems to have been an outbreak in early April in a small town in Mexico which resulted in some 20+ confirmed and 140+ suspected flu death. These seem to have been primary infections – i.e. people near huge factory pig farms in La Gloria, Veracruz State caught this first. So far only 10% of the 1,300+ total infected in Mexico died.
It is not astonishing at all that a virus transfer from pigs to humans could happen. Pigs and humans have very similar organisms. All conspiracy theories around this have so far no factual ground.
The virus seems to be able to transfer from man to man too but probably in a less severe form. There have only been few death cases yet outside of Mexico and the total non-Mexican infections are in the lower dozens. In this globalized world a real pandemic outbreak would likely ramp up faster.
There are wide ranging estimates of 'normal' U.S. death through flu per year from a few hundred up to 60,000. This because a flu is often the 'last drop in the bucket' that kills a person with already severe medical conditions. Therefor the total numbers from Mexico and elsewhere may turn out to be just be a statistical irrelevant blip. Certainly not every death of people who had the virus in the blood stream was caused by that.
We do not yet know how well those people who died in Mexico were before the flu infection caught up with them and how well the medical care was they got – if any. But it is likely that they were already in relative weakened state and had little care.
For all the above reasons it is very unlikely that this will turn out to be a re-run of the 1918 flue pandemic. Today we know much more about virus infections and how to fight them. We know much more about epidemics. Even if this would be a serious one, which I doubt very much, I am confident that we could handle a real one pretty well.
Now lets get back to the real issues. Why again did the U.S. torture people?
I lived through SARS, here in Taiwan.
Scared the shit out of most, back then. To this day, you can see hundreds of people each day wearing their masks out in public. SARS did that; it established a culture of “if i’m sick with a cough, i’m gonna wear a mask to protect you all from me.” That existed somewhat before, but it’s much more prevalent now.
SARS didn’t scare me much because i wasn’t in the demographic likely to be hit, the mortality rate was very low, and it wasn’t easily spread from human-to-human.
From what i’ve heard about this Swine flu, though — it scares me. 200 people dead in a month, in a single town? Fuck. 33 people died in all of Hong Kong during SARS. People were scared and screaming everywhere, back then. 200 dead, now, in a small-ish Mexican town that’s far, far less dense than anything found in Asia? Whoa.
I’m not fanning the flames, but i don’t think this is something that can be easily pooh-poohed as a tempest in a teacup. Not yet. The SARS scare continued for six months, and the disease vectors developed steadily during most of that. We’ve only seen the first wave of this, so far. It’s not clear how well it spreads from human-to-human, but it’s influenza. The Spanish Flu killed millions world-wide; they weren’t but a drop in the bucket when reckoned against the world population, but putting a loved one who was young and healthy only 15 days ago will fuck you up. It’s nothing to sneer at, and it quite clearly could happen.
We had Avian Flu/SARS, and now only a few years later, this. Clearly, the bugs are marshaling themselves for a full-on assault, and it’s going to come some time soon. That makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint; human beings have become far more pervasive and filthy in their influence than cockroaches could ever hope to be, and Mother Nature is indicating her intent to do something about it. Will it be the Apocalypse? This wave certainly won’t be, and we’re pretty sure we can contain anything that aspires to that role.
But that said: the fear is real, and it has little to do with the Media. All they’ve done, so far, is report something that rational people have every right to worry over. I live in Taipei, Taiwan, one of the most crowded and population-dense places on the planet. If swine flu arrives and starts hopping from human to human, there isn’t much i can do besides stay indoors and hope it passes me by.
So for my part, i’m glad to be hearing these reports.
But beyond that, i agree with b’s greater point: none of this is any reason for us to stop doing what we’d be doing anyway. It’s not like we’ll be able to make things better or save ourselves by fretting and brooding over this.
That’s the WHO’s job, but as long as we’re at it i think we should also be pressing to have Tamiflu released under an open-source license. It doesn’t make any sense to have a pill that can be manufactured for fractions of a penny — and which could potentially save tens of millions of lives — only be available to a scant few members of the US/UK elite. People like the Cheneys and Bushes certainly don’t deserve them, so maybe it’s time we started pointing this out.
Ultimately, there will be no justice until Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush are in prison — preferably an Iraqi one, run by a few of Saddam’s ex-guards. Do y’all really think it silly or shallow to point out that precisely those sorts of people stand to gain a great deal from the world-wide misery an epidemic will some day bring? For my part, i don’t. In fact, it fans my anger even more.
So let’s be sure to keep the pressure up.
Why did the U.S. torture?
Well, we don’t really know the answer to that; but so long as the people responsible go free, and continue to reap great proft off of other people’s misery, then the U.S. is simply an evil system, run by evil people, and — since it’s a democracy — populated by evil citizens, and nobody in the world will be able to take anything it says about human rights or political freedoms seriously.
Posted by: china_hand2 | Apr 28 2009 2:04 utc | 16
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