Swine flu's so very overblown. It's not the freaking bubonic plague. The regular, standard flu kills way more people. I wonder how many cases of regular flu there were at pax this year.
Well yes and no. H1N1 is a regular "standard" flu, just like every strain of flu is (otherwise it might as well be called something other than flu, right?). The danger with H1N1 is that it's expressing similar surface proteins to the 1918 Spanish flu strain (hemagglutinin 1 and neuraminidase 1) which caused death in young folks through a massive cytokine reaction. Pretty much the immune system overreacts to a these new proteins and short story, your lungs get destroyed. Flu strains mix and match their segmented genomes between species, and occasionally, you get a strain with just the right amount of new proteins expressed that the general population has no antibodies to, and you get a shitstorm of really, really sick people.
But yeah, the main hype over Swine Flu is it's H1N1 designation, which relates it to the 1918 flu pandemic. If medicine and hygiene practices were as good in 1918 as it is today, I doubt as many people would have died.
The media has done a wonderful job of terrifying the population into thinking H1N1 is a doomsday virus, but it is a serious thing if you experience symptoms like extreme tiredness, blue in the lips, unresponsiveness.
As far as killing fewer people than the regular seasonal "pandemic" of flu. I don't think you can say yes or no either way...
---------- Post added at 10:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:44 PM ----------
Swine flu's so very overblown. It's not the freaking bubonic plague. The regular, standard flu kills way more people. I wonder how many cases of regular flu there were at pax this year.
As Zen said, swine flu is killing the younger people. As a young person myself, I see this as a problem, since it's supposed to be the old people who get really sick and die from things like the flu.
More problematically in the long term, though, is that this is a fairly new strain of flu in humans. With the normal types of flus that get around, we know most of the possible mutations they can get (E.G, what the different possible strains look like), and they're mostly fairly harmless as long as you're healthy. This new swine flu, though, is a freak combination of both a pig flu and a bird flu, and so we don't really know what mutations it's capable of. With any luck, it will blow over like bird flu did, because none of its possible mutations are all that nasty. However, there's always a very real chance that this one will turn out to be the flu that can develop the truly deadly strains. Hopefully, this new type of flu will also prove to be relatively harmless. One of these days, though, we are going to get a new type of flu that will have a possible mutation that transforms it into something as bad as the 1918 flu. Remember that the 1918 flu killed over 3% of the population of the entire world, making it worse than the bubonic plague, and that the swine flu is of the same sort of type.
Again, with any luck, this will be harmless. But every time we get a new type of flu, we run a risk of it mutating into something truly lethal. Definitely something worth washing your hands a little more over.[/QUOTE]
This entire section needs a /facepalm.
