Enough With The Pig Flu


It's the pandemic that squeaked. Or oinked. Or whispered. When is this disease going to get frightening? The 1995 Dustin Hoffman movie "Outbreak" was scarier. If you want terrifying reading, pick up Richard Preston's 1994 bestseller, "The Hot Zone." That'll keep you up at night wearing a mask over your face. But the swine flu?

The swine flu is terrifying alright. It reminds me of SARS that swept the nation a few years ago leaving hundreds of widows and orphans in its wake. Remember Avian flu? Remember how we had to quarantine thousands and there were bodies piled up like cord wood? Or how about that devastating West Nile Virus? Shrank the population by a third as I recall it.

Look, I get it. A new strain of flu that no one has antibodies built up for with the potential of it mutating and becoming more virulent and contagious is a frightening thing. I read "The Hot Zone." But A/H1N1 has infected less than 1,000 (confirmed) people worldwide. It's killed one person in the U.S. and that poor little boy wasn't even from here. Chuck Norris has a bigger body count even in a bad Chuck Norris film. Wait, all Chuck Norris films are bad. That's beside the point.

There are less than 150 confirmed cases in the U.S. Contrast that with the fact that in an ordinary flu season, somewhere between 10 and 50 million Americans contract the flu and 36,000 die annually from it. Seasonal flu is one of the top 10 killers in the U.S. every year.

There's been a lot of talk about panic. The only ones I've seen panic over this in the U.S. has been the media. They've covered it 24/7, waiting for something...anything to happen. When Vice President Biden shot his mouth off about not being in confined spaces with people, the media pounced all over it because there was so little to report on the actual disease.

I'm a layman. But anyone with two eyes could see that this bug didn't seem to be terribly contagious. Plus it responds to two of the four flu medications out there. If the virus was easily contracted and was resistant to medication, then yeah, that's something to be alarmed about.

Now I write this not as some smug fearless know-it-all. In fact, due to my health situation, I'm someone who the seasonal flu could prove to be quite deadly. And if this bug were to mutate, then all bets are off. In fact, I believe superbugs pose as big a threat to mankind as anything.

But I've had enough of the swine flu coverage. I'm sick alright. Sick of these flu reports. Hasn't an intern been murdered or a teen turned up missing in an exotic locale or maybe a washed up jock has killed his wife? Go back to wall to wall coverage of the latest Hollywood starlets' meltdown and only interrupt your puff pieces with flu news when something dire happens.

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