Swine flu

[cjsmith]

My information about the swine flu situation comes from two sources:

1) the WHO web site and the people who link to it

2) LJ and Facebook people going AAAAAAH NOBODY PANIC! STOP PANICKING! SERIOUSLY, CUT IT OUT RIGHT NOW!

Has anybody seen anybody panicking? The news may be full of stories describing panic; note the total lack of traditional news media in my info list above. Has anyone here seen or talked to someone who was off their nut about it?

Comments

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

"Mild" is what I'd been hearing, too, although I don't see how that squares with reports that it can kill. Maybe it can kill only if your body doesn't have reserves to draw on? I'm no medical doctor.

The generic "mild" flew kills many thousands per year in the US, so even "mild" has some leathality. I think the concern that it's not mild comes from two imperfect pieces of evidence.

1. A number of deaths in Mexico.... but without, I've been given to gather, any sense of out of how many infected.

2. Fears derived from the fact that it's an H1N1 strain. Nobody short of about 90 years has any H1N1 immunity of any sort. When that came around the second year in the 1918 pandemic (the first season it hit was a lot milder, just didn't get spread as much, I suppose) it had a few percent mortality rate, which I think meant 500K-700K US deaths, something like that. It was also notable in that, unlike most flus that have a big spike in mortality for the very young and very old, the last incarnation of H1N1 to hit the planet also had a "middle" spike centered in the 20s or 30s. (Wikipedia has a graph) Nobody knows, but the theory is that the 1918 flu triggered some sort of immune something or other called a cytokene storm, but ... dude, nobody knew was a virus was in 1918.

Today, we have a lot more stuff to treat people with, and I'm guessing that even if this did work out to be "as bad as 1918" something like 70M doses of the appropriate antivirals would make a difference. And if this goes slow enough to push into next flu season (we're close to summer), we might have a vaccine by the Southern Hemisphere's flu season, or at least ours the end of the year.

Given all that, probably worth taking seriously, at least for a government. Right now, I don't see any reason for me to avoid the airport (I'm at Denver International right now).