PANDEMIC/PANIC

[MakoMike]

Pure unadulterated hype by the news media. They pay "pandemic" which it was, without ever really defining the term. To most folks it sounds an awful lot like "epidemic" which it was not.

[MarshCappa]

IMHO it looks like they are handling it just fine. I don't too much information is bad in this case, especially if you have young kids that go to day care and school systems.

[Backbeach Jake]

When things get hyped like this, it's always to divert our attention from something else.

[FishermanTim]

When I heard the first references to the "Flu outbreak of 1918", the first thing to pop into my mind was a simple fact that these so called medical experts fail to acknowledge is that we have flu vaccines nowadays. Although that won't stop the flu, it does make your body more prepared to combat a variety of flu strains.
When they start to adjust the numbers of people that have contracted/died from this SWINE FLU (not H1N1), and the numbers go down, the "hype theory" get more credible as each day passes.

[justplugit]

Originally Posted by FishermanTim

When I heard the first references to the "Flu outbreak of 1918", the first thing to pop into my mind was a simple fact that these so called medical experts fail to acknowledge is that we have flu vaccines nowadays. Although that won't stop the flu, it does make your body more prepared to combat a variety of flu strains.

Ya, the 1918 pandemic was also before antivirals, and antibiotics for secondary infections.
US death toll was 675,000.
In the 1968 Hong Kong pandemic there were 36,000 US deaths which would have been a lot higher
without antibiotics and i believe it was before effective antivirals.
I had the Hong Kong flu back then and it was a bear.

Hope they can develop a safe vaccine for this strain before the fall
when it could become more of a problem.

[Mr. Sandman]

Anthrax, vaccine shortages, and SARS, West Nile virus, potassium iodide pills, anthrax, smallpox, SARS, influenza, Mad Cow disease, avian flu, asbestos, mosquitoes, and dengue, mold, what else can I think of?… Y2K, Global warming, no more petroleum left on earth, aliens, all way over hyped by the government and media. Remember Y2K?...whew!! good think we survived that!..... utter BS. No nuclear weapons would have been launched and no planes would have crashed at midnight because the date didn't change properly but we spent billions protecting ourselves from our own media/govn driven fear. Swine flu was bull%$%$%$%$ too. it wasn't 200, it was more like 30. and even if it was 20000 it is still not time to panic. Newpapers live for panic headlines like this. I can't wait for them to dissapear alltogehter, (what a waste of good wood that could be used for making plugs!)
More people are dying from bee stings and space trash falling from the sky than swine flu.

[Raven]

but what can happen is a virus can come from an extraterrestrial source.....
be suspended in the earths upper atmosphere
and then some natural phenomenon like a small asteroid/comet
punches thru bringing it to Earth ...

then we are all doomed.

so you had better carve a big stone with your name
and your best plug design to achieve immortality.