oh yea the flying-pig flu. oy.
I'm more worried about it hurting my money than anything.
In mexico, roughly 2000 ppl got it, 150ish died? Mind you, these are not confirmed. so that right there is a 7.5% mortality rate, which isnt so good. However, it needs to be considered that this is in mexico, where the health care is probably not as good. Also, possibly some of these patients had previous infections and what not.
In the US there have been 91 confirmed cases resulting in 1 death and 5 people hospitalized. The death was a small child, which is sad, but children have weaker immune systems.
Now to put this swine flu into perspective, remember that each year 36,000 Americans die due to the your regular, average, run of the mill, seasonal flu.
Do we need to start panicking yet? probably not. Restricting travel to Mexico is smart, but having americans freaking out is no good. Our economy is in trouble; last thing we need is people staying home and not spending money at bars/malls/strip clubs for fear of getting some disease. Hopefully this swine flu will end up like SARS and the avian bird flu, as proof that people will freak out when the media hypes things up.
On the dark side, a flu pandemic in 1918 killed 50 million people and a flu pandemic in 1957 killed 70,000 americans, and in 1968-9 killed 33,000. However, medicine has come a ways since then. Also, if this really did turn into a pandemic, strippers would probably be the first to catch it :-/.
No, we dont have a vaccine for this... since the virus has started spreading human to human it is mutating quickly. However, there are antiviral medications that hinder the viruses ability to replicate.
Oh yea, the first documented case of this particular swine flu was a 5 yr old boy, Edgar Hernandez. He recovered fully

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