Saturday, July 08, 2006

"Plastic Panic" is a good name for this....

From money.cnn.com :

It was a hysterical government trumpeting that everyone was going to die when swine flu mutated and jumped species and human-to-human. People freaked out. The people that got the vaccine got sick and no one got the swine flu. It never jumped human to human although there were isolated incidences of species jumping.

The bird flu is very real and can be a problem. You can (as things stand now) avoid the bird flu by not playing with sick live chickens.

It also does not appear to be behaving as the trumpeters are trying to drum up fear and trepidation.

There have been incidents where families have contracted bird flu and it has appeared to spread within a family. This was only 1 isolated case in Vietnam and has not occurred anywhere else.

If you want to really worry about something, worry about West Nile or Lyme disease.

As far as Tamiflu, Rummy made an absolute obscene killing on this stuff. Tamiflu does appear to be effective, in a small way.

So far, as of now, the virus has not mutated into one capable of jumping species. I'd suggest you not spend a lot of time with live chickens and you probably and hopefully will be fine.

The latest occurrences of bird flu also appear to be milder - viruses morph at a phenomenally rapid rate.

Check out the connection:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/31/news/newsmakers/fortune_rumsfeld/?cnn=yes

Wrap... [thanks, Chrissie!]

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