swine flu is a hoax, a lie say no in 2009

[Despanan]

Hmmm...you might be one of the early test subjects.

Tell me, does the name "Duane Reid" mean anything to you?

[creature6]

well i had to look but i find what it was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane_Reade
hmmmm interesting .
what was the question?
which month is it?
Is it summer?
Yes it must explain the snow we had recently.

[JCC]

Originally Posted by creature6

no you idiot she actually attended conferences

And all the other doctors are hermits?

[creature6]

are they?
well we learn something everyday.

[Ben Lahnger]

Wow! Incredible paranoia here. I do like the article Despanan linked to about debunking the conspiracy theorists. Occam's Razor is indeed one of the most useful things a person can know and be mindful of in these days of "pay attention to my disfunctional paranoia" freakishness.

If a government wanted to poison masses of people, they could try to encourage a bunch of them to volunteer to come get a vaccine innoculation ... or they could just dump the toxin in the drinking water supply. You see a rash of people dropping dead? I haven't.

H1 N1 is completely different that the 1976 flu. A completely different vaccine had to be developed for it. I've had the regular flu vaccine and the H1N1 vaccine. I'm delighted to report that I did not die, although I'm annoyed to have to share with you that I did still came down with a mild version of the regular flu. My doctor tells me the effects were probably lessened and the duration was probably shortened because I got the vaccine. Meh.

Those of you that want to cling to your paranoid conspiracy of danger from goverments scheming to experiment on you and bring about your demise should just (if you can detatch your brain from the emotional reward of riding the "they're out to get me" train) consider this:

Government and politicians make their bones on tax revenues. There's no real reward to any of the "powers that be" in reducing the tax base.

[misstressofthedark]

ive been told that swine flue only affects pigs not humans, not sure how true that is but deffo bird flue was a lodda shit otherwise birds woudda been dropping here there and everyware and it would be poping up on the news everytime it happened, id say its alodda shit to scare the nation personly, you know what they say, never belive everything you hear on TV

[PortraitOfSanity]

Originally Posted by misstressofthedark

ive been told that swine flue only affects pigs not humans, not sure how true that is but deffo bird flue was a lodda shit otherwise birds woudda been dropping here there and everyware and it would be poping up on the news everytime it happened, id say its alodda shit to scare the nation personly, you know what they say, never belive everything you hear on TV

Are you really this stupid, or be thee trolling?

[Ben Lahnger]

That's not the "Mistress of the Dark" that I know. Elvira has a pair of spectacular boobs that I've admired for a long time.

This poster is clearly just a boob, and a singularly slight one at that.

[creature6]

swine flu is an hoax .
enough said.

[retribution]

I preffer to stay away from pharmaceuticals whenever necessary. Fuck the pharmaceutical industry.
I didn't get the shot, and never intend to.

From what I've read the swine flu doesn't seem much worse than the normal flu.

Its just the dumbass media trying to make a big deal out of stupid shit.

[Triton]

Swine flu is not a hoax (in that it wasn't an intentional attempt to fool people), but it is also not a major world health threat either.

The problem is one of the medical community being poorly trained in basic biology rather than medicine.

It goes back to the 1918 epidemic flu that killed 50-100 million people world-wide. Since then, there has been an understandable fear that such a pandemic could occur again.

The flu that was responsible for that pandemic was an H1N1 strain (it was not the same strain as the H1N1 strain around now). But what does that mean? Well, like everything, we have to have ways of differentiating and naming flu viruses. Unfortunately, like most of our naming systems, people, even trained experts like doctors, tend to forget that these naming systems are somewhat arbitrary and mean far less than we actually think.

H1N1 flus are no more dangerous than any other types. The name comes from two proteins found on the viral coat of the virus: Hemagglutinin and Neuraminidase. Each virus has these two proteins, and each protein comes in many forms. Each form of the protein gets a number. So, for "H" a virus could have form #1, or #2, or #3, etc. Same for "N".

This is where part of the problem comes from. It turns out that Hemagglutinin and Neuraminidase are not what are called virulence factors. In other words, they have nothing to do with how dangerous the virus is. They are just convenient name tags that are easily identified. There's no other real reason we use them to name flu strains. But because the 1918 flu was an H1N1, doctors start getting nervous whenever a new H1N1 strain shows up. However, this is like getting freaked out every time you meet someone named David just because David Berkowitz was the Son of Sam. The name has nothing to do with the potential threat. It turns out that any flu strain has the potential to become a dangerous pandemic strain, and what we really need to look at is what causes certain flus to realize this potential.

And this is where the medical community needs to brush up on their basic biology. It turns out that what causes a flu strain to become more deadly than usual are environmental factors that cause the evolution of higher virulence. In the last years of WWI, the conditions on the Western Front caused an otherwise mild form of an H1N1 strain, most likely carried from the US by new recruits, to evolve into a killer strain. First, conditions in the trenches themselves were horrible. Poor sanitation, poor nutrition, extreme stress, overcrowding, etc., created a perfect breeding ground for the flu, and made it easy for it to spread widely, even from people who would normally be so sick from it that they would be bed-ridden and unable to come in contact with other people were they in a more normal setting. This gave an advantage to forms of the virus that reproduced very rapidly, because they could still spread widely even though the people they infected were incapacitated by their rapid reproduction.

To make matters worse, once a person did become completely incapacitated by the flu, they were evacuated through over crowded field hospitals and evacuation hospitals, and transported numerous times in overcrowded ambulances and trains. This meant that a person who was so sick that they couldn't move instead acted like some one able to walk around among many new people, most of whom themselves were already in an unhealthy state. In the first 48 hours after evacuation from the front, an infected soldier was likely to take at least one ambulance ride and one train ride (sometime stacked like cord-wood in box cars) and move through at least 3 hospitals, almost all of which were at >10x normal capacity. This, again, gave a massive reproductive advantage to those forms of the virus that reproduced the fastest, even though they would normally kill people too quickly to spread effectively. All this, of course, led to a very powerful natural selection of the deadliest strain, which would normally lose out to less deadly strains that would spread more effectively.

So, anytime flu (or any other infectious disease - we're starting to see the same thing with TB now) gets into a population of people who are subjected, either through poverty, war, or repression, to substandard levels of nutrition, sanitation, crowding, and health care, natural selection automatically starts to favor those forms that reproduce more rapidly, because even though those are the forms that normally make you too sick and ill you too quickly to spread effectively, under those conditions they get an advantage over the forms that we normally see.

We are never likely to see a flu pandemic like 1918 again, unless we have a major collapse of modern society (which, admittedly, could happen), simply because there won't be a large enough group of people subjected to those kinds of conditions who then spread out around the world like the soldiers did at the end of the war in 1918.

But we can see this same pattern with the current H1N1 strain. When it first showed up in Mexico City, it was worrying because it was acting like the 1918 flu: it was killing a high percentage of people infected, and it was killing the young rather than the old. However, Mexico City also has some of the largest and poorest slums in the world - with a population of over 21 million, it is one of the largest and most crowded metropolitan centers in the world. So, in the poor areas of the city, conditions are similar to those of the soldiers in WWI, causing the evolution of a particularly deadly flu. And when this flu escaped from Mexico and moved into more affluent areas, like the US, it was at first still deadly. The first few cases in the US also were in young people and had high mortality rates. But within just a couple of weeks of invading more prosperous countries, where the more dangerous forms no longer had an advantage in spreading, the less dangerous forms took back over, and the H1N1 flu became less dangerous than the contemporary seasonal flu. By the end of the first year of the H1N1 scare, it had an overall mortality rate lower than the seasonal flu, and that mortality was no more shifted to young healthy people than the normal flu. In other words, as soon as the selective pressure favoring increased virulence was removed, the flu rapidly evolved to be its normal relatively harmless self.

But medical professionals are generally poorly trained in evolutionary theory and continue to fail to grasp the importance of evolution in understanding the spread and virulence of infectious disease, so they continue to make erroneous predictions about things like flu pandemics. Sometimes it comes off as being overly alarmist, like with H1N1, and, tragically, sometimes it goes the other way, with them failing to take adequate action against (or even contributing to) the evolution of dangerous infectious diseases.

[Ben Lahnger]

Jesus! Another dead thread resurrected! For what? This isn't even socially relevant anymore.

[Triton]

Originally Posted by Ben Lahnger

Jesus! Another dead thread resurrected! For what? This isn't even socially relevant anymore.

These are news stories posted today

H1N1 Still A Pandemic, Says WHO (8 hours ago)

H1N1 Strikes Again (3 hours ago)

Sharp rise in H1N1 deaths this month (23 minutes ago)

Just because it isn't on your social radar doesn't mean it isn't socially relevant.

[Ben Lahnger]

No dude, it isn't socially relevant here, as evidenced by the fact that after January (over 6 months ago) there were two straggling posts in what was a dead subject here ... all talked out ... and then you resurrected it for no good reason other to hear yourself speak.

[creature6]

swine flu is an hoax .
enough said.

[Hearts_Purple]

The regular flu kills more people than swine flu.