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A swine flu chat

Dr. Anita Barry, director of the Infectious Disease Bureau at the Boston Public Health Commission, talks about, well, you know:

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Comments

We're all going to get ... well, the flu.

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doesn't look promising :-/

http://www.swinefluworldmap.com/

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Is that supposed to be an interview?

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Given that both people work for the commission and all.

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Good article explaining the possible origins of the outbreak:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/27/swine-...

A La Gloria resident who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity yesterday described how illness swept through the village. "Some people started getting ill in February and an eight-month-old baby died," she said. "After that another baby died on 21 March. Suddenly most of the village got ill. It was weekend and the tiny clinic here was closed. The state health authorities then did send doctors and nurses to look after us, and give us medication. About 60% of the village were ill and we asked them what it was and they said it was a severe and atypical cold. We talked about influenza and they said that was impossible, that influenza had been eradicated from Mexico."

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The 1918 Pandemic is now believed to have originated in a small town in Kansas much earlier in the year than when it exploded back and forth across the atlantic.

In that area, there were a lot of farms where people lived in close contact with chickens and pigs. Like there were in much of the US at that time, really.

That small area of Kansas also had a military base with soldiers training to go to Europe. Lots of people got mysteriously sick in the spring, and then it seemed to fade away. The rest, as they say, is history.

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The word "Panic" Like "Hero", gets misused a lot these days. Notice all of the news coverage from Mexico City? Notice there are no angry crowds surging through the streets, holding doctors at gun point and demanding an instant cure. Notice there is no sign of "panic".

I reported to Basic Combat Training on March 18th 1976...at Fort Dix NJ (BCT Brigade B-13), 19-year-old Pvt David Lewis of Ashley Falls, Massachusetts, had died on April 28th, of Swine Flu, in that same training unit, where 500 soldiers had become sick and recovered. There was no panic at Fort Dix or the surrounding communities. It was election time and the government politicized the event and rushed a vaccine to market, and mass distribution, that proved to be...well shall we say, less than a quality product. Only young Lewis died from the swine flu itself in 1976. But as the critics are quick to point out, hundreds of Americans were killed or seriously injured by the inoculation the government gave them to stave off the virus.

Still, there was no panic.

In 1979, I was stationed, with my wife and infant son, at Fort Indian Town Gap PA, you guessed it...right on top of the 3 Mile Island incident. As a young MP, I remember standing guard at the door while senior military and civilian officials tried to plan the evacuation of all points East and South of 3 Mile Island, including the Interstate 76 corridor and Philadelphia. They obviously had done little advance preparation and the consensus seemed to be that they should just leave everyone in place and deal with the casualties. Still, you will not find any news reports from that period of Philadelphians running wild in the streets, in a state of panic.

Fast forward to 2005, now living in Dallas TX, I can show you pictures of me standing in waist-high water, going from house to house, along with another volunteer (a trauma surgeon from upstate NY), supporting a local Louisiana Fire/Rescue Team as they search for people who had sent text messages to relatives in Ohio and other States, reporting that they needed immediate help and their lives were at risk. Even though it was a full week before the US Army Joint Task Force Katrina arrived in the city, as I moved through the streets of New Orleans, I saw no panic. I saw a few crooked and lazy Cops, (most were on the job and there for the people of New Orleans), I later saw news reports of criminals trying to take advantage of the opportunity presented by the Katrina emergency and victimizes people, (in my pictures, I am holding an M4 rifle with M2037 attached and all of the Fire/Rescue personnel are armed with rifles or Shotguns), but there was no public panic, just frightened people needing help.

A lot of folks are running around saying “don’t panic”, but most of those folks have never seen real panic. Those are the same people who typically jump up-and-down and yell hero when someone does their job, conscientiously and professionally… the way everyone should. A lot of those folks have never seen real heroism either. Political types like to cover up the inability to plan at the community level, by claiming that such planning will involve communicating issues and ideas that will cause people to panic. In my experience, I have found that this is just a smoke screen to cover the inability of government personnel to plan in detail and incorporate community resources into their planning…its simply more work than they are interested in doing and covering up their mistakes and rewriting history is easier.

By the way, the number one suspected reason that is being identifies as the cause of death in Mexico City’s H1N1 outbreak, as opposed to the lack of deaths elsewhere, is the failure of people to go to the doctor promptly and instead electing to self medicate, until they were so sick, they absolutely had to go to the emergency room. Here in the U.S., we consider people who opt to get a doctor to examine them at the first suspected sign of the flu, “panic”. I wonder if that has anything to do with the failure of these medical institutions to prepare for the surge capacity levels that they all knew would be necessary. Very Interesting.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30571857/

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