Swine Flu: Stop Worrying

"The swine flu is a pandemic now," my mother said in a concerned tone. I gave her my typical "oh please" look.

"It’s a big deal. There hasn’t been a pandemic in over forty years."

I had no idea what a pandemic was, and I also had no real idea how big this swine flu thing was. I know people talk about it constantly, but I avoid the news in general.

So I looked up how many people had died from the swine flu. We just topped one hundred deaths in the United States.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

How in the world is anyone worrying about this? Let’s be generous and say that one hundred people died in a month from the swine flu (it’s actually been longer than that).

In that same period of time more than a thousand people died from tobacco use. Ten times the deaths, but swine flu is all over the news. Almost two hundred people died from anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen. I didn’t even know people died from those.

Yet we all know about the swine flu. The bird flu from a few years ago was the exact same sort of thing – only about one hundred people died.

We all know that wasting time is bad and that wasting money is bad, too. What about wasting our focus, getting sidetracked by hyped up issues like swine flu that are wholly insignificant?

(on the plus side, pork consumption went down because people incorrectly thought that it could cause swine flu)

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There are 16 Comments.

Ali

Jun 14th, 2009 @ 6:49 am

Okay you are right to say that worrying too much is stupid… but this is a lot more widespread than bird flu ever was. The thing is, now is not the normal flu season. When winter comes this flu will spread like wild fire and though it has only 1 in 100 death rate, if it infects 100 million people (easily possible in the US alone) then thats a million deaths… but still, the chance of it killing YOU is very low.

cmirik

Jun 14th, 2009 @ 7:43 am

I totally agree with you on this. All that bird flu thing was stupid too. It’s just some kind of distraction that goverment uses.
It might be a political weapon too- prices of pork go down and someone benefits from it!

Andy

Jun 14th, 2009 @ 8:09 am

Who cares? I really don’t subscribe for crap like this.

Karol

Jun 14th, 2009 @ 9:27 am

Back during the bird flu era I had a personal trainer who tried to sell me on some kind of supplements that would help prevent me from getting bird flu.

He wasn’t my personal trainer anymore.

The reason swine flu (and bird flu, et all) gets more attention in the press than, for example, tobacco deaths, is simple in my eyes. The press needs fresh depressing news stories no matter how insignificant. The public has been desensitized to “normal” forms of tragedy.

mark

Jun 14th, 2009 @ 10:39 am

One of the big reasons the 1918 flu epidemic killed so many is there were a lot of undiagnosed TB cases.

These flus aren’t that bad, but if you are already nursing a bad case of tuberculosis and have poor living conditions, you probably will die of swine flu if you get it

Mike Roberts

Jun 14th, 2009 @ 12:42 pm

I feel the same way, but people’s fears are so real that I don’t bother trying to convince them otherwise.

I was planning on working at a friends house in Rosarito Mexico the week the swine flu dominated the news, and upon hearing about it my buddy did not want to go into mex.

I contacted rental owners in the area and they were practically begging me to rent their places….

tetra

Jun 14th, 2009 @ 1:17 pm

It is true that the media needs to hype the danger, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a danger. After all 63000 people die annually from seasonal flu in the US alone. So even if swine flu is no worse than regular flu when the fall season comes, it would still kill an awful lot of people. This is particularly worrisome when you consider that swine flu seems to hit young people much harder than regular flu. As far as Avian flu goes, the danger is that it has a high fatality rate, so if it does jump the deaths could be orders of magnitude above seasonal flu. So considering the other dangers being hyped in the news, like the latest toxin scare, or birdstrikes on planes, swine flu is downright legitimate.

Brian

Jun 14th, 2009 @ 6:02 pm

This is simply an easy payout for the media. It really shouldn’t be anything to scare like the media portrays it to be. I heard that at the peek of the media frenzy that the best selling items on amazon was face masks.

The media is scaring everybody just so they can make money.

Required Names are Retarded

Jun 14th, 2009 @ 6:23 pm

You are sort of way off your mark here. First, if h1n1 jumps to a new strain, literally, no one will be leaving their house, and a lot of people will die there.

If anything, the media us under covering this. Just because there are not a lot of deaths, and you can find stats that more people die in a hour form farting too hard, does not mean that the potential for this to outbreak is not there.

I suggest you read the article by the scientist who first discovered h1n1.

This is not about where it is now, and all about what it could turn into, and how completely underprepared we are for it if it does.

We know little to nothing about it, and there are blog posts like this, that spit out a cut feeling based on logic to them, but not logic within the scientific community.

I have a friend who works close to this at the CDC, I am told, he can not tell me anything specific, but that this is not something to just brush off, and the CDC is not happy at all about the news coverage.

Tobacco deaths and car accidents are not contagious. The bird flu is a good example, where we were prepared and helped to stop it’s spread, this is a case where the opposite is going as, as we do not know how to vaccinate for it.

All fires start out small. I thought you were all about research, all about your spend the day to figure out how to do accounting, immerse yourself into it, and here you are, posting a blog post that in reality, you should delete, and write again after you stop being like the rest of the news stations out there.

amer

Jun 14th, 2009 @ 9:47 pm

You are right, about stats but it doesn’t mean that we should not stop the spread of swine flu. Some basic hygiene practices can help slowing down spread of swine flu. Yes panicking will not make general public any safer, but drug companies need to make vaccine before flu season. And public needs to be informed that this flu season, young and healthy should get flu shots too.

Brian

Jun 14th, 2009 @ 11:41 pm

I don’t care about the swine flu, thus I know nothing about it. It really isn’t worth the trouble. The point of this post is to not worry about it. It might be a problem but it’s not worth stressing over. Recently a recruit died in basic training in the air force from a flu. Not related to the swine flu, it’s actually ‘adenovirus 14′.

Adenovirus are common during military bootcamp, should I be scared? No. The ratio is probably near the same as the swine flu. It’s just not worth worrying about. The chances of catching it isn’t worth the stress so simply put “It’s not that big of a deal”

Scarfo

Jun 15th, 2009 @ 7:55 am

So swine flu is good because it stops people from eating meat??? That kind of holier-than-thou posturing is why people, rightly or wrongly, hold such a negative opinion of vegans.

Sean

Jun 15th, 2009 @ 9:16 pm

How many people have died from regular flu in the last month or more?? I guarantee you its more than 100. I am glad that the hysteria has at least died down a little over the past few weeks…

Shnugi

Jun 16th, 2009 @ 6:33 pm

Swine flu is definitely effect people more than the normal hyped up pandemic. I had swine flu; it sucked. I don’t think that I’ve ever had normal flu before, so swine flu was a pretty different experience.

Thi

Jun 17th, 2009 @ 2:32 pm

Weak post that is prompting even weaker discussion. Writing every day and upping your hits is just a vanity metric.

I’d rather read one of your old posts again than constantly have to sift through this new drivel. Check out this article on falling victim to the “new” craze:

http://www.philalawyer.net/archives/the_fierce_idio.phtml

Perfection is not adding more on, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Chris.

Aug 24th, 2009 @ 5:41 pm

“When winter comes this flu will spread like wild fire”

it’s winter in the southern hemisphere. where’s the wildfire? it’s normal flu season stuff down there.

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Swine Flu: Stop Worrying

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