Swine flu is something that I have wanted to post about since I it first reared its ugly little head. The more I read the less I’m interested, the more it’s hyped the less I care, for some reason I feel like I’m the only person who thinks this way. Do a Google search for the term swine flu and you’ll have 10 million results. Turn on the evening news and if it has been a slow day it will feature, the same goes here for newspapers.

Everywhere you turn swine flu looms over you like a storm cloud waiting to drench you in a plague so virulent that only climbing aboard Noah’s Ark could you survive. I remember feeling equally nonchalant about bird flu which posed a similar threat to the world. The Word’s media of course tried/and successfully managed to whip us up into a frenzy on that one. I bet they made a fortune in selling more newspaper, as for the TV, at least they had another story to concentrate on, other than the usual from the front line and political pieces.

Only by the grace of God have we so far manage to survive bird flu. Who knows how we are going to survive swine flu or the more insulting name of Spanish Flu! Yes, that is right, they are one of the same, H1N1 is the cool name. What I want to know is why the name changed? and when did it happen between 1918 (the last outbreak) and 2009 (current pandemic)? and is there any correlation between Spanish and Pigs?!

When there was bird flu the media fuelled the fires, and like a well executed PR campaign the world got so scared that Governments had to react, they luckily turned to the pharmacies to protect us; from what I remember they very quickly, suspiciously quickly in my opinion had the answer, Tamiful! Hurrah, a cure!! The US Government alone put in an order for $1.4 billion worth in November 2005, so it must be good. – I’m not going to question it’s effectiveness, as I as they say am no expert, but read Wikipedia entry on it, it is interesting. – What I do want to highlight is that at that time the worlds stock levels where massively depleted, with a free for all of governments clambering to take all the stock they could muster. Doesn’t to me sound like the correct way to stop the spread of a human race exterminating disease, surely fighting it on the front lines of where the disease is spreading, would slow down the spread or stop it dead. In which case countries should work together, and not just look after ‘their own’ (hmmm, reminds me of global warming! if only we could work together).

In any case, bird flu was a non event, the World Health Organization (WHO) on the 1st July 2009 reported that bird flu (H5N1), yes it has also got a cool name) killed since 2003 a staggeringly unimpressive 262 people. Now, at this point you are thinking one of two things, either, ‘wow, I’m heartless, 262 poor souls died and I’m calling that unimpressive, or you are thinking ‘wow, is that really all, I thought it killed thousands?’ Whatever your line, surely you would reason, the attention, the hype, the media circus, them billions spent on the pandemic alone is way out of proportion, to say the number of fatalities in road accidents in Great Britain for the year of 2007, which was a low year, coming in at a whopping 2,946! or the some 155,484 cancer deaths in the United Kingdom for the same year!

Proportionally, bird flu seems to have over captured the cause for concern limelight, in much the same way swine flu is doing now, so far the death count stands, according to the WHO at 429 since identified. Of the cases I have read about, and this is anecdotal evidence, all deaths have had some over underlying health issue, and this push them over the edge, so to speak. While the death toll is already bigger than bird flu, it is not impressively so, it is no where on my radar of problems to be thinking about, when I think about the destruction of the planet’s oceans, or the troubles in Somalia. Yet the media coverage is significantly focused on rehashing Armageddon through super viruses. The fact is while in times before basic sanitation, poor medication, lack of nutrition and all the other comforts we enjoyed today, there may have death rates in the millions when these took affect. However, many cases may have been misdiagnosed, and wrongly attributed. Even with that being true, the news does not talk about every death attributed to seasonal flu, 100′s million infected yearly and between 250,000 to 500,000 people die as a result, year in and year out. In comparison to that bird and swine flu combined over the past 10 years seems pretty minor.

I guess only time will tell if I’m right to be indifferent about these pandemics, no doubt in a few years there will be other strains strains for us to get our ‘end of world’ teeth into; no doubt when the next super drug is out.

Anyway here are all the cool flu’s of the future and now. Some have names other than the cool ones, over seem not to, so I have decided to name them, guess which are real and which aren’t
H1N1, Spanish or Swine Flu
H2N2, Asian Flu
H3N2, Hong Kong Flu
H5N1, Bird Flu
H7N7, Sneezy
H1N2, Sleepy
H9N2, Happy
H7N2, Dopey
H7N3, Grumpy
and
H10N7, Bashful

Don’t worry, I didn’t forget one, Doc was treating them all. Let’s hope none have underlying health conditions.

Photo by zpeckler