Acording to the W.H.O. on the BBC World Service this morning 30/4 actual CONFIRMED death's in Mexeco from this outbreak is 7 yes 7 although this will change as more samples are checked this is apperently due to the difficulty in determining the exact strain of flu most of you are falling in to the Media trap of using the word pandemic without the suffex level 5,Andy in the UK last winter 2008/09 there were 12,000 deaths due to Ordinary Common Garden veriety flu so go on enjoy your trip and post any pics you can when you get back.
BON Voyage

I'm not worried. I've only caught flu once in the last 38 years.

Besides, if I do get it, I have this to help with the recovery ;)

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According to the W.H.O. on the BBC World Service this morning 30/4 actual CONFIRMED death's in Mexico from this outbreak is 7 yes 7 although this will change as more samples are checked this is apparently due to the difficulty in determining the exact strain of flu most of you are falling in to the Media trap of using the word pandemic without the suffix level 5,Andy in the UK last winter 2008/09 there were 12,000 deaths due to Ordinary Common Garden variety flu so go on enjoy your trip and post any pics you can when you get back.
BON Voyage

I'm not worried. I've only caught flu once in the last 38 years.

Besides, if I do get it, I have this to help with the recovery ;)

Lets hear It for the Oinker! ;)

Good find Andy!

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Very good! Where can I get some?

From the Los Angeles Times:

Scientists see this flu strain as relatively mild
Genetic data indicate this outbreak won't be as deadly as that of 1918, or even the average winter.

By Karen Kaplan and Alan Zarembo
April 30, 2009
As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.

"Let's not lose track of the fact that the normal seasonal influenza is a huge public health problem that kills tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands around the world," said Dr. Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine in Madison.

His remarks Wednesday came the same day Texas authorities announced that a nearly 2-year-old boy with the virus had died in a Houston hospital Monday.

"Any time someone dies, it's heartbreaking for their families and friends," Olsen said. "But we do need to keep this in perspective."

Flu viruses are known to be notoriously unpredictable, and this strain could mutate at any point -- becoming either more benign or dangerously severe. But mounting preliminary evidence from genetics labs, epidemiology models and simple mathematics suggests that the worst-case scenarios are likely to be avoided in the current outbreak.

"This virus doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to kill like the 1918 virus," which claimed an estimated 50 million victims worldwide, said Richard Webby, a leading influenza virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

When the current virus was first identified, the similarities between it and the 1918 flu seemed ominous.

Both arose in the spring at the tail end of the flu season. Both seemed to strike people who were young and healthy instead of the elderly and infants. Both were H1N1 strains, so called because they had the same types of two key proteins that are largely responsible for a virus' ability to infect and spread.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health published genetic sequence data Monday morning of flu samples isolated from patients in California and Texas, and thousands of scientists immediately began downloading the information. Comparisons to known killers -- such as the 1918 strain and the highly lethal H5N1 avian virus -- have since provided welcome news.

"There are certain characteristics, molecular signatures, which this virus lacks," said Peter Palese, a microbiologist and influenza expert at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. In particular, the swine flu lacks an amino acid that appears to increase the number of virus particles in the lungs and make the disease more deadly.

Scientists have identified several other differences between the current virus and its 1918 predecessor, but the significance of those differences is still unclear, said Dr. Scott Layne, an epidemiologist at the UCLA School of Public Health.

Ralph Tripp, an influenza expert at the University of Georgia, said that his early analysis of the virus' protein-making instructions suggested that people exposed to the 1957 flu pandemic -- which killed up to 2 million people worldwide -- may have some immunity to the new strain.

That could explain why older people have been spared in Mexico, where the swine flu has been most deadly.

The swine virus does appear able to spread easily among humans, which persuaded the WHO to boost its influenza pandemic alert level to phase 5, indicating that a worldwide outbreak of infection is very likely. And the CDC reported on its website that "a pattern of more severe illness associated with the virus may be emerging in the United States."

"We expect to see more cases, more hospitalizations, and, unfortunately, we are likely to see more deaths from the outbreak," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters Wednesday on her first day at work.

But certainly nothing that would dwarf a typical flu season. In the U.S., between 5% and 20% of the population becomes ill and 36,000 people die -- a mortality rate of between 0.24% and 0.96%.

Dirk Brockmann, a professor of engineering and applied mathematics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., used a computer model of human travel patterns to predict how this swine flu virus would spread in the worst-case scenario, in which nothing is done to contain the disease.

After four weeks, almost 1,700 people in the U.S. would have symptoms, including 198 in Los Angeles, according to his model. That's just a fraction of the county's thousands of yearly flu victims.

Just because the virus is being identified in a growing number of places -- including Austria, Canada, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Spain and Britain -- doesn't mean it's spreading particularly quickly, Olsen said.

"You don't ever find anything that you don't look for," he said. "Now that diagnostic laboratories and physicians and other healthcare workers know to look for it, perhaps it's not surprising that you're going to see additional cases identified."

And a pandemic doesn't necessarily have a high fatality rate. Even in Mexico, the fatalities may simply reflect that hundreds of thousands of people have been infected. Since the symptoms of swine flu are identical to those of a normal flu, there's no way to know how many cases have evaded government health officials, St. Jude's Webby said.

As the virus adapts to its human hosts, it is likely to find ways of spreading more efficiently. But evolution also suggests it might become less dangerous, Olsen said.

"If it kills off all its potential hosts, you reach a point where the virus can't survive," he said. Working to calm public fears, U.S. officials on Wednesday repeatedly stressed the statistic of yearly flu deaths -- 36,000.

Sebelius and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano also rejected calls to close the borders, which several lawmakers reiterated Wednesday on Capitol Hill.

"We are making all of our decisions based on the science and the epidemiology," Napolitano said. "The CDC, the public health community and the World Health Organization all have said that closing out nation's borders is not merited here."

Though scientists have begun to relax about the initial toll, they're considerably less comfortable when taking into account the fall flu season. They remain haunted by the experience of 1918, when the relatively mild first wave of flu was followed several months later by a more aggressive wave.

The longer the virus survives, the more chances it has to mutate into a deadlier form.

"If this virus keep going through our summer," Palese said, "I would be very concerned."

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Calm Chaos Forum...Join Calm Chaos Now

IMHO - I think it might be easier to sneeze, cough, or otherwise exhale into the ARM PIT - it's not normally exposed to public contact, easy to reach despite most age related handicaps, and gain an extra advantage of finding out if you REALLY need a cold shower.
So far the media tells us beware of pandemics caused by monkeys, pigs, birds, cows, fish, tomatoes, peanuts, peppers, prepared salads, bottled water, and probably a few more I haven't heard about.
As long as Health Agencies are in touch with each other, and Medical Science can IDENTIFY as potential threat - I say live your life, wash your hands, go to school, trust your diety, love yourself and your neighbor, and pay your insurance premiums.

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Classic WU= 7,237 Classic Hours= 42,079

Pandemic 'imminent'

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me@rescam.org

Pandemic 'imminent'

Interesting article Misfit.

Even more interesting is how the story varies between media outlets.

Company I work for has banned anyone returning from Mexico going back into work for 10 days after they return. - San Diego is one of the places I am visiting, which appears to be badly affected, yet work hasn't made any allowances for people returning from there yet.

It's in the UK already in numerous locations, so if the virus is going to jump human to human then it's probably a bit late to be bolting the door.

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SAVE THE PIGS...

Farmers fear pigs may get swine flu from people

By Carey Gillam – Fri May 1, 1:11 am ET

KANSAS CITY (Reuters) – Humans have it. Pigs don't. At least not yet, and U.S. pork producers are doing everything they can to make sure that the new H1N1 virus, known around the world as the "swine flu," stays out of their herds.

"That is the biggest concern, that your herd could somehow contract this illness from an infected person," said Kansas hog farmer Ron Suther, who is banning visitors from his sow barns and requiring maintenance workers, delivery men and other strangers to report on recent travels and any illness before they step foot on his property.

"If a person is sick, we don't want you coming anywhere on the farm," Suther said.

Those sentiments were echoed by producers around the nation this week as fears of a possible global flu pandemic grew, with more than 200 people sickened, including more than 100 in the United States, and at least 177 dead, all but one in Mexico.

"There is no evidence of this new strain being in our pig populations in the United States. And our concern very much is we don't want a sick human to come into our barns and transmit this new virus to our pigs," said National Pork Producers chief veterinarian Jennifer Greiner.

"If humans give it to pigs, we don't have things like Tamiflu for pigs. We don't have antivirals. We have no treatment other than to give them aspirin," said Greiner.

The World Health Organisation on Thursday officially declared it would stop calling the new strain of flu "swine flu," because no pigs in any country have been determined to have the illness and the origination of the strain has not been determined.

The never-before-seen H1N1 flu virus has elements of swine, avian and human varieties.

PIGS BEHIND SECURITY FENCES

Still, U.S. hog farmers said flu fears have hit them hard in the wallet as hog prices plummeted this week in response. Many countries reacted to the outbreak earlier this week by banning pork or meat from U.S. states that have human cases of the flu. And Egypt ordered the slaughter of all pigs in the country as a precaution.

U.S. hog producers have already been struggling financially for more than a year due to poor prices and high feed costs. If the new flu strain does hit their herds, it could spur further price declines, and could potentially spread broadly through herds.

To try to protect against such a scenario, industry groups and veterinarians this week warned farmers to step up their biosafety protocols, keeping pigs in barns behind security fences with access by any outsiders extremely limited.

Purdue University veterinarian Sandy Amass said farmers should keep an eye on pigs for "coughing, runny nose, fever and a reduction in feed intake," and to have the animals tested immediately if they exhibit such flu symptoms.

"Pigs get flu just like people get flu," Amass said. "We're want to do everything possible so the pigs don't get infected."

For Carroll, Iowa, producer Craig Rowles that means if any of his workers feel sick, they are ordered to take time off work -- paid -- to keep them away from the pigs.

"It's a real issue," Rowles said. "If the pigs get it, there isn't much we can do. Water, aspirin, and bed rest, that's all we've got."

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Calm Chaos Forum...Join Calm Chaos Now

Every year 36,000 people die in the U.S. from influenza.
EVERY YEAR! 36,000 American people die from influenza!

This is nothing
Get off the hype train and stop making Rumsfeld richer by helping spread panic.

"The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself." FDR

ACHOO! Oh God! I'm gonna die!

Every year 36,000 people die in the U.S. from influenza.
EVERY YEAR! 36,000 American people die from influenza!

This is nothing
Get off the hype train and stop making Rumsfeld richer by helping spread panic.

"The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself." FDR

ACHOO! Oh God! I'm gonna die!

Robert, Are You sure Yer in Quarantine?

And what does Rumsfeld have to do with the Flu?

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Hey Setizens, we better call it N1H1. We must remain politically correct.
(...IN A PIG'S EYE!!!...AND PUN INTENDED.)

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BETTER THE WORLD ~ PAY IT FORWARD
...

Rumsfeld was Chairman of the Board at the company that produces Tamiflu.

He holds an estimated $20 million in shares in the company.

Every time there is a pandemic scare, he receives another Brinks truck full of money.

There is a reasonable thought behind the
media hype about all kind of disease, you know..
If they manage to horrify enough people, many will die
of fear, and by that it will be fewer who atually
dies of the desease itslef. In this way, those who
may want to "call themselves responsible" for peoples
survive, can tell they managed the situation So well,
that only Very Few died of the particular illness.
Smart ;-) .. the only real question is; How many of
us is going to take that bate? ;-p ;-)))

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Poor little piggies have hired body guards and gone into hiding.

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BETTER THE WORLD ~ PAY IT FORWARD
...

The Sapphire Princess' (right) arrival in San Diego yesterday morning marked the first of at least 12 cruise ships that are set to dock in San Diego instead of at Mexican ports because of the swine flu outbreak.

SWINE FLU: RESPONSE TO A GLOBAL CRISIS

Scientists studying genetics of flu strain

Mexico's first fatality didn't seek help quickly

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me@rescam.org

Flu bug under a microscope

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Calm Chaos Forum...Join Calm Chaos Now

Flu bug under a microscope

Nice color ;-)

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the most dangerous is not the flu hitself, nor his/her/its complications, but the risk of panic.
who is or will be the person responsible ?