ciccio said:

What no one seems to have mentioned is the the regular flu kills a few hundred people every season. In this respect swine flu almost seems benign.

36,000 a year in the US according to the CDC.

        TomT said:

A certain degree of over reaction is appropriate when trying to head off an outbreak.

Hmm. “appropriate over reaction” seems like an oxymoron. If the reaction was appropriate, then how is it an over reaction? An over reaction is a reaction greater than what is needed.

Maybe I’m just thinking too hard.

Yes, there is something very wrong with calling it on every strain, it causes people to stop listening and wastes a lot of money too.

The one idiot who dropped the ball worst was the VP with his idiotic statements that had the airlines and scared everyone while making the government seem totally out of control. I guess there is the whole issue of readjusting to the new vice president style. Cheney was definitely in command and important (too much so at times) but I think we all knew Biden was an empty suit and a placeholder who was just supposed to not get in the way. He’s an idiot, but oh well, we had an idiot vice president with Dan Quayle so it’s not new.

I do think that it was improper for California to declare a state of emergency on this one though, because a state of emergency is something that should be reserved for major hurricane strikes or a big earthquake or something.

So in my opinion the swine flu reaction went from a reasonable over reaction to a def con 1 over reaction that wasn’t good.

        DV82XL said:

We will see. The point has been make that the first appearance of the 1981 strain six months before it turned into a full pandemic was not all that bad ether, so I think it’s premature to say we are out of the woods yet.

Nevertheless this Mexican strain WAS killing people and whatever apparatus we have in place to deal with the inevitable rise of a killer virus takes time to rumble into action so I guess I would prefer it to get moving sooner than later in a situation like this, and any rate the system probably benefits from a dry-run like this before the main event.

EVERY strain of the flu has the ability to become a massive pandemic. This kind of overreaction is becoming the standard issue response to ANY kind of new flu strain or ANY indication that there is even the slightest chance of a pandemic or a major outbreak.

This happened a few years ago with the Avian flu that never even managed to become a human-to-human infection.

A flu outbreak happens: Airports shut down, governments declare a state of emergency, stock markets drop dramatically, people run on pharmacies trying to get anti-flu drugs, students are held out of school while their families stock jugs of water and shot guns in the basement.

This is becoming par for the course and we’re getting to the point where we’re going to see this every year for every flu season and every time a laboratory isolates a new strain the world is going to panic.

When and if a new strain does show up that is clearly very deadly from the beginning, what are we going to do to somehow make it clear that it’s not like the others? if every flu strain means a “state of emergency” is called, then what do you call when there is one that is clearly much greater than the normal strains? Declare a “state of super emergency” or a “State of emergency, no seriously, this time we really mean it.” or a “State of tragic, catastrophic, disastrous and dire emergency”

The National Weather Service understands this. They do not declare a “tornado watch” over every storm that they know has a remote possibility of spawning a tornado. If they did that, the watches would be ignored and even though by using restraint there are the rare occasions that a tornado occurs without a watch or warning ahead of time, it is preferable to getting to the point where one is declared nearly every day and thus it becomes meaningless.

There’s alot of other issues with the free-style pharmacy: people with viruses load up on antibiotics (inneffectual on viruses); people start & stop antibiotics (without completing a full course). Both of these practices lead to resistant bugs. Now I don’t think the system here in the US is perfect, but I for one see a value in having medical professionals ‘gatekeeping’ some of these drugs.

Nevertheless this Mexican strain WAS killing people and whatever apparatus we have in place to deal with the inevitable rise of a killer virus takes time to rumble into action so I guess I would prefer it to get moving sooner than later in a situation like this, and any rate the system probably benefits from a dry-run like this before the main event.