« The Dichotomy of American Torture
Quote of the Day: Freed Pirate Hostage Blasts Limbaugh On Pirates »
Swine Flu: We’ve been waiting
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.
20 Responses to “Swine Flu: We’ve been waiting”
Racist. But then Im sure you intended to make this post racist so you could stir up a bit of controversy.
Its a vicious spin by the left to completely run the gop out of this nation. The march to fascism continues unabated. Yes I know this OP professes to be a Libertarian but it is obvious that he is also a racist by implying that only white people can afford insurance.
What a crooked crock of lyng spin the left is perpetuating on the masses, considering 40 million have no insurance. The population is 300 million and only half of America is now WHITES.
Do the math. 40 million Dont have insurance and I know a few white people who dont have insurance so thats only 39,999,998 Non Whites who dont have insurace to combat the flu and according to statistics 20 million of them are the illegals in this country illegally. With the 2 white people that I know thats putting more and more holes into the spin by the lefties who want health care for all at the expense of any and everything.
Now if we could just find a flu that killed Whites only then the world would be so much better off. Oh….more specifically WHITE REPUBLICANS who have health care.
This is why the internet is a cesspool and blogs are the armpit of that cesspool.
Health insurance has little or nothing to do with the way a pandemic disease will be treated. The public health system will be maximally engaged (whether or not they're up to the task is another issue, but still, having access to antiviral drugs will have no relationship to the insured status of the people who might contract this disease.)
So anyone who's trying to spin one way or another about a health insurance debate is talking nonsense.
Some good points in your article about potential reasons for a seemingly higher fatality rate in Mexico, Jazz, but it's also probably too soon to assume that's necessarily true. The sample size of the number of cases in the US is too small to get a handle on what the rate ultimately will be.
This article also lists some other factors that may make the disease worse for Mexicans than for most of us in the US, including poor air quality in Mexico and poor nutrition which affects the immune system.
Are the oldest and youngest really at greatest risk? Most of the people who died in Mexico after being exposed to the swine flu were healthy adults between the ages of 20 and 40. That would suggest that the H1N1 virus is highly contagious and that people who spend time in public places such as workplaces and markets may be at greatest risk. The incubation period is between 24 and 48 hours, so people can get infected and fly across national borders before any symptoms appear. Tamiflu is available in limited quantities in nations such as the U.S. and other industrialized nations, but if the reports from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control are correct, it is already too late to contain this outbreak. All the health officials worldwide can do is try to educate people and doctors on how to recognize the symptoms and then treat them as quickly as possible before the virus runs its course. One problem is that if the numbers of people who acquire the virus become large enough in a short period of time, there won't be enough Tamiflu to go around. And it will likely be several months before a vaccine can be developed. That is why health officials are deeply concerned. This pandemic will occur. The question is how prepared the world will be to try and fight it.
[...] have a winner! The Moderate Voice, in name only, yaps on about the social and racial injustice of fluism, then denounces those [...]
The biggest political question is whether or not the Senate will allow President Obama's healthcare team to assume positions. At present they are being blocked for selfish political reasons and not for reasons of substance. If this virus has the potential of the 1917-1919 pandemic (which killed a number of my family), we will need a coherent leadership in those positions.
I agree with your basic points, Jazz, but this may be one of those outbreaks where people between 20 and 40 are be at higher risk. Their immune systems are generally strong, and may trigger an overreaction called a cytokine storm, badly damaging their lung function. Given that many of the Mexican dead appear to be fairly young, this could be happening here.
That said, it's too early to be panicky or complacent about the differences in mortality. A CDC spokesman cited in this AP report says that the true incidence rate in Mexico may be higher than 1000, so that the mortality rate may be lower than it appears.
There's a White House briefing on this in an hour. Should be interesting.
Does anyone have any information on when this started popping up, etc? Admittedly I haven't been following this too closely, but it seems like they just identified it last week and there is already full scale panic. That's not enough time to figure out what's going on.
Actually this has the most details I've been able to find
I'm still wary of thinking we know much of anything about it. I mean SARS seemed terrible until they took very basic preventative measures and it quickly was in control.
Should you or a loved one be infected, it might save a life to look carefully at drug effectiveness. Tamiflu, mentioned above, is not so effective, as Dr. Estes noted in her post. A review of all available studies appeared in The Lancet (UK):
“The use of amantadine and rimantadine should be discouraged. Because of their low effectiveness, neuraminidase inhibitors should not be used in seasonal influenza control and should only be used in a serious epidemic or pandemic alongside other public-health measures.”
This virus is already known to be resistant to those drugs. But since we bought $1 billion of Tamiflu for bird flu (against which it is also pretty ineffective), we have plenty and it will be used, probably ineffectively, against this flu. Better you should insist on something that has not already proven to have “low effectiveness.”
GD I think you're getting mixed up, Tamiflu is effective against swine flu, but amantadine and rimantidine are not. Tamiflu is oseltamivir.
On CStanley's health insurance comment, both of the drugs effective against swine flu (tamiflu and relenza) are expensive so insurance coverage could be a problem. I know the govt has stockpiled some Tamiflu but I don't know what they will do with it. Setting up a distribution system takes quite a bit of time.
DG you're correct. I confused the generic name for Tamiflu. However, it is still a neuraminidase inhibitor and hence subject to the “low effectiveness” criticism of The Lancet.
As to the question why people in Mexico are dying but those in the US aren't (yet)… It could be that the virus loses its potency as it is transmitted from one person to another. Some viruses do that and other viruses may gain in strength.
I know someone that survived the Avian Flu with the Breath of Life Emergency Escape Mask. I just got one at http://www.ProactiveAndPrepared.com
CarlosGuev2: “I know someone that survived the Avian Flu with the Breath of Life Emergency Escape Mask.”
I don't get it…. the mask is used short-term when you know you're being exposed to smoke, bio toxins, chemicals, etc. It's not meant as a vaccine or as a cure….
Just how did this person survive the Avian Flu with it? I'm not expert but I think Avian Flu is generally transmitted by direct contact with infected birds… If the Avian Flu was transmitted through the air and you knew you were being exposed to it you could wear the mask for 15 to 20 minutes and perhaps escape…. And the mask might be a good idea to have on hand so you can escape when you know you're under attack by airborne threats…
So what am I missing? How did this device save someone with the Avian Flu, which is primarily transmitted through direct contact?
DaGoat- the CDC is moving stocks of Tamiflu to the ground zero states, which is how the distribution chain works. Again, as I noted previously, we're going to have to hope that the agencies are up to the task (and God help us if this becomes overly politicized as I'm afraid is bound to happen and I see is already starting.) But I still maintain that none of the success or failure of treatment protocols is going to be related to health insurance or lack thereof- there's no way that the antiviral drugs would be rationed according to insurance status or ability of the individual to pay in a true public health emergency like a severe flu pandemic.
mikkel- I think the first cases were the week of April 12. Nothing that's happened has been out of the ordinary (if anything, the reporting was a bit slow because Mexican authorities chose to send the samples to a Canadian lab instead of the US CDC- which probably would have made the information public more rapidly. I was actually really surprised that it's taking as long as it is to move from WHO class 3 to class 4 status (admittedly though I haven't looked at the numbers of cases in Mexico which would either indicate widespread community outbreaks, or not- which tells you a lot about the contagion level.)
But all of the alerts are a necessary process to set in motion the procedures to try to contain a pandemic- and the officials really can't act swiftly enough because you only get one chance to contain. Obviously an unfortunate side effect of making the information public is the tendency for panic and rumormongering, but that just comes with the territory and has to be tamped down as much as possible to coordinate an effective response.
The great influenza of 1919 killed mainly young, healthy people, and a lot of soldiers with (for the time) good medical care and support. I think your spring break kids got lucky.
Stockboy- I think the only thing you're missing is that that comment was spam.
I read his discription of an American Spring Breaker as write, but actually im not white and went on spring break
I heard that WHO has warned that it can be a global epidemic, I hope it will not be happen.