Joe Windish has already been covering this for you, but I wanted to share a few thoughts on the looming prospect of an influenza pandemic. Reports are already reaching us this morning that eleven people have died in Mexico, but people are recovering from the disease at a few locations in the United States, specifically in New York City. Why? Are we some sort of super-species? Does the swine flu have too much class and good taste to go around killing Americans, choosing instead to focus its efforts on poor people from “other countries?”
Hardly. The flu is not, by definition, a terminal illness. It has a set course that it runs in the human body, going through various stages (and wreaking havoc on you in the process) until it finally peters out. The only question is whether or not you can survive long enough for the disease to finish its run. This will depend on a variety of factors, principally your age, state of health and economic status. The very old and the very young will be at the greatest risk, along with those who are already ill or have compromised immune systems.
If you are poor and can not afford nominal medical care you will also be at greater risk. Surviving a bad case of the flu will involve plenty of rest, personal care and continual hydration for starters. If a group of wealthy college students from Long Island come back from Spring Break with this infection and survive we shouldn’t be terribly surprised. They are young and largely in the peak of health. They have families, medical insurance and a good support network. If anyone is going to survive, they are.
This shouldn’t make us complacent, though. Nature has a nasty way of pruning back the population on a regular basis. Not so long ago – in fact, within the living memory of some of our oldest citizens – somewhere between 50 and 100 million people died from 1918 to 1920 when a strain of this disease rocked the entire planet.
As further proof that no situation is too serious or global in nature to twist into a political circus, I point you to Allahpundit and Michelle Malkin.
As for the immigration angle, the boss is already all over it. A perfectly secure border wouldn’t stop this from spreading — see, e.g., SARS hopping across the Pacific from China to Canada in 2003 — but it sure might slow it down. Ah well, it’s “racist” to even think such things. Apologies.
I was watching an update on the Long Island families on CNN this morning. They were students who went to Mexico on Spring Break. You know the type… white people from the “good families.” Somehow I doubt that a bigger wall on our Southern border to keep all the filthy brown skinned people out would slow something like this down. We live in a world where the rich, influential and properly documented do a lot of travelling between countries and continents. Influenza doesn’t recognize nationality or political party affiliation.