Ok. What are the details? It was a 23-month-old toddler. Was this child sick with another illness, perhaps an auto-immune disorder or some type of cancer which would greatly influence the fact that it wasn't JUST the swine flu in play here. Was the child transported to the hospital in a timely manner?
This stuff makes me crazy. Maddie came home from school yesterday saying she was freaked out about it. I asked her why. She is strong, healthy, she exercises and eats properly. If she gets the flu, her body is in prime condition to fight it off. What is there to be afraid of?
Oh, she said.
Exactly.
So far there has been ONE death in the U.S., not hundreds and certainly not thousands. Is that what it would take to freak me out? Yes. Thus far there have been 50 deaths in Mexico and 2,000 people with the illness. Ummm, that just doesn't seem like a huge, enormous big deal to me, I'm sorry. Call me crazy, but again, do I know that those 50 people didn't have something else going on, that in tandem with the flu, caused them to die? I don't. I don't have anywhere near enough facts to get to freak-out stage one.
When you consider that between 20 and 40 MILLION people died in the flu pandemic of 1918, pardon me for not going all cuckoo over 51 deaths. There is also consideration that the deaths of that time were not caused by a strain of flu, but by tuberculosis, since flu typically affects the infirm, elderly and small children, whereas the 1918 disease went after people between their 20's and 40's -- often killing them almost immediately. There are countless stories, like four women who got together to play cards, and by the end of the night three of them had died.
The fact that scientists are STILL not sure what happened in 1918 does not make me believe they have any idea what could happen today. It is all theories based on computer models which are designed to create worst-case scenarios.
All I hear lately is about the swine flu. It is all over the Internet, it is on local news, talk shows, it is getting its 15-minutes of fame and then I hope it fades off into oblivion.
The facts are that out of a world population of 6,776,520,595 people, 51 have succumbed to this new strain of whatever it is. In the time it took me to type in that number (taken from the popluation clock) it jumped to 6,776,520,640. In under a few seconds the world's population increased the number of people it lost to the flu. In one minute it went from 6,776,520,791. In no time at all, the population has already doubled the number of people lost to this strain.
I am just saying. Context, people. Context.
This map is kind of cool -- it has labels where every suspected case of flu has been verified and you can click on them and see more detailed information. In the Northeast, there are actually reports of 1 case in New Jersey, one in Connecticut, and several in Maryland. Epidemic? Or not?
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