Apparently a Mexican National visiting the US.

Kid was already sick with the flu when he came to Houston from Mexico.

Came for treatment.

Hard to call it the first US flu death...

First cases in New England just confirmed... in my town. Great.

http://www.boston.com/news/health/blog/2009/04/lowell_children.html

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

Am I mising something here ??? 10 to 20 dead and this much of a knee jerk reation (media and the rest)
More people die in car wrecks ea day..whats the deal here ?

People are illogical sissies, the media are unethical morons who thrive on fear mongering. That pretty much sums it up.

Car accidents are a common and well-understood risk. There is nothing to sensationalize there.

A new disease is scary and its risk is hard to understand quickly.

because it's a new strain with combined elements that form a high potential of a massive pandemic
one that would carry a death rate of 10x what normal yearly flu carries...And it's more effective at killing young people because of the way it works...

so you got :
- Human to Human infections
- it's a mix of avian, swine and human flu
- potential to change very fast ( like becoming resistent to Tamifly or Relenza)
- potential for a 5% mortality of those infected
- It affects mainly younger people
- nature's #1 job is balancing things out, right now, we have upset the balance, so it's to be expected that nature will try it's best to fix it, us that is.

You say knee jerk reaction now, but if there was no reaction... and everybody just ignored the threat,
then we might very well have woken up one day with the 1918 flu pandemic,
times 10, more people on the planet, more and bigger cities, more and faster travel....

Should we panic right now? no.
Should we be paying attention? Hell yes.

The wiki page shows the infections and deaths and is updated regulary..

If you consider that last friday, there was nothing known to us.

And now this thing is updated... daily... with numbers that go up each day...
And that these things spread exponentially... it doesn't take a wild imagination


Spain 3 days ago, 1st suspected infection... now, 10 confirmed
US, 3 days ago..5 =10 ... now 93 confirmed
Mexico... up in the thousands...

You have to keep in mind, that these things don't start off fast.. but as they go along, it spreads exponentially...

Mexico : began last month, a lot of nothing for a while, then it went up like crazy in no time..

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...tion-graph.png

You have to take that flat line , and extrapolate it to each possible new area of infection... If that graph is representative for what is going to happen, then You can expect to see the toll rise in each of the countries..

The only thing the CDC knows 100% sure, is that they do not know where 100% of all infected people are... They have reports of people who only had a mild reaction to it... but were still infectious... So carriers may not even know they have it and spread it unknowingly...

All this time, the virus can spread, and at any given time, it may devellop into a fully resistent strain...

Posting the swine flu toll since we're in the midst of the Wuhan flu crisis.

The former killed a lot more young folks and spared the elderly in relative terms.

I posted in this thread on 4-26-09. Earlier that month I was sick as hell, a memorable sickness. Only reason I remember the date is because we did a family road trip to St Petersburg FL, ALMS race weekend. Now I wonder if that's what I had. Didn't occur to me at the time.

Amen

I was right after all.

NO YOU ARE NOT Tabs

you said 180 million will succumb to it !
It's not even 180k at this point !!!


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