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Old Thu Apr 30, 2009, 10:39am
Dakota Dakota is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Twin Cities MN
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RKBUmp View Post
I keep hearing that the medical experts saying that this flu is really no more dangerous than the regular strains, yet the media keeps hyping the crap out of it. Texas has canceled all high school sports, AZ has shut down an entire school for 7 days after a single student tested positive for it 2 weeks ago and they were saying on the radio yesterday that some countries were pulling pork products off the shelf because of the swine flu scare.
This does seem to be a fairly mild strain of flu. The difference with the swine flu is:

1) We have no vaccine (which is normal for the initial outbreak of a new strain, so see #2)
2) The initial outbreak was in North America instead of the usual Asia, which means
a) American media is going nuts about it, as is their normal practice with anything they can make into a crisis, real or imagined,
b) The WHO and CDC are more concerned than they are about the usual Asia initial outbreaks due to the much higher global mobility of North Americans that your typical rural Asian.

So far, we have suffered through a devastating first week or so here in the USA and have see a total of 0.00003% of the normal annual deaths from the normal flu outbreak in the USA, and the normal death rate happens when we have vaccines available...
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