Mexican Pandemic

[SkyWolfe]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090424/ap_ ... _swine_flu

This freaking anyone else out?

I don't feel it will explode, but I am not a micro biologist. It really seems to be the big news subject on the tele tonight...

Midnight thought Wolfie....

[87Strat]

Not sure if this will be the big one, but my wife is a health care professional, and when they talk of the next pandemic, it generates a lot of nervous laughter. One thing is for sure, it's a ticking time bomb.

If it were to happen now...well let's not go there.

[BibleMonkey]

....CDC officials described the virus as having a unique combination of gene segments not seen before in people or pigs. The bug contains human virus, avian virus from North America and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia....

CIA courier dropped the vial. Clumsy bastard.




Oh well. We had a good run.

[BibleMonkey]

I wonder what is going to doom us next week.

I'm putting a dollar on the " Terrorists with global warming avian flu, wearing newk-leeahr pants "
square .

If only we had forced our leaders to confiscate more air-luggage toothpaste and lobbied harder for the bathtub helmet law, we could have avoided this nightmare.

[BibleMonkey]

I'm not too worried about Chicken flu, or Swine flu.

It's a little known fact that the Beaver spreads way more disease. As I understand it, it's okay to pet the beaver-but anything more and you're just asking for it.

[BibleMonkey]

Okay, this is a serious thread dammit.

Stop wrecking it with smart ass remarks, eh.

[BibleMonkey]

[SkyWolfe]

Feeling okay there Bible Monkey?

Yes, every week something horrific is going to get us. You have been praying to the economy god haven't you?

[Just another canuck]

That swine is diseased??

*picks up pork ribs and begins chewing* mmmmm... swine.

[BibleMonkey]

Feeling okay there Bible Monkey?

Yes...after years of practice and self-sacrifice I have achieved a state of nirvana, the perfect peace of the state of mind , free from craving, anger and other afflictive states, an enduring, transcendental happiness integral to the calmness attained through enlightenment . I am still working on the smart-ass part, though. (: I hope you are doing good too.

Yes, every week something horrific is going to get us. You have been praying to the economy god haven't you?

Every day, between the time I go to sleep and when I wake up, between twenty to forty thousand humans on the planet die from an easily preventable condition subsumed under the heading "starvation'; that is, ten to twenty thousand humans die daily ( a good portion of them under five years old ) from water borne disease-which risk we remove in North America for a few pennies with sand filtration and a little splash of chlorine.

It's a matter of perspective , I guess, -a few dozen Mexicans making headlines because of dying of cause B ( new flu ) , when thousands of Mexicans ( and who ever else ) die and have been dying daily from cause A ( easily preventable water borne disease ) , make me not ascribe much significance to cause B.

I know-the Spanish flu killed more millions of people in two years right after WWI than all of the millions that died in WWI, but they didn't have electrical respiratory support -if it hit now we'd survive.

Humans are terrible at assessing risk. I used to think that statistics were kind of boring. This guy ( Scandanavian scientist ) has an interesting web site .

http://www.gapminder.org/

http://www.gapminder.org/videos/

Aids grew like hell in ten years in Africa. I was surprised to see it leveling off. Why? Because when enough people die , ( a shockingly high number ) -the disease stops. Science and statistics are both cruel bitches. That's just the way it is.
http://www.gapminder.org/world-blog/see ... ds-in-hiv/


===

You have been praying to the economy god haven't you?

You know, that's an interesting point. I used to hold the view in theology and philosophy, at any rate, that there couldn't be a Devil, unless there was a God. Last year, between Haloween and Christmas roughly, forty percent of the worlds wealth was removed. Where did all that wealth go? Maybe in economics, at least, there can be a devil without a god.

========

Anyway-sorry for funning in your thread. I didn't mean no harm. Please don't whup me no mo'.
(:

That "200 years of history in 4.5 minutes " gapminder video is kind of cool.

[JakeYYZ]

Ok, which one of you libtards have been diddling the pigs and chickens….AGAIN.
ROCKIE!!!!...........I’M LOOKING AT YOU!!!

[Hedley]

Not me!

I like boobs.

[Rockie]

Ok, which one of you libtards have been diddling the pigs and chickens….AGAIN.
ROCKIE!!!!...........I’M LOOKING AT YOU!!!

I like pork, but not that much.

[Invertago]

Ya, Biblemonkey, starvation kills more, but this pandemic is more scary though because it has the potential to kill Americans!

I forget the minimum requirements to make the news but it was something like...
1 dead American
2 dead Canadians
5 dead Mexicans
10 dead Asians
10 000 dead Africans

Oh, and don't they report 1000 dead Arabs as a good thing on Fox news now to?


But seriously, this pandemic gets our attention because it can and likely will affect us personally.

[Mac]

The fifth paragraph down in this article made me raise one eyebrow...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... =worldwide

[CD]

Nova Scotia confirms four cases of swine flu in province

26 Apr, 1:28 PM

HALIFAX, N.S. - Health authorities in Nova Scotia are confirming four cases of swine flu in the province.

The province's public health officer, Dr. Robert Strang, says the four infected people in Windsor are recovering from the illness.

All of them had what he describes as "mild" cases of the flu.

Sources say British Columbia has found a pair of cases but it is not yet clear if they have a link to Mexico.

Canadian officials are planning a briefing today in Ottawa on the swine flu situation, which the World Health Organization has declared to be a "public health emergency of international concern."

Mexico's health minister says the disease has killed up to 81 people and likely sickened more than 1,300 since April 13.

[kevinsky18]

The fifth paragraph down in this article made me raise one eyebrow...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... =worldwide

I wonder how long it will take for the conspiracy theorist to run with this one. Obama shows up in Mexico, meets scientist. Scientist dies next day of mystery illness and a pandemic starts to spread.

Possible assassination attempt? But wait Obama didn't get sick? Hmmm maybe the perpetrators didn't anticipate the CIA counter measures. (they made Obama wash his hands )

[hazatude]

....CDC officials described the virus as having a unique combination of gene segments not seen before in people or pigs. The bug contains human virus, avian virus from North America and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia....

CIA courier dropped the vial. Clumsy bastard.




Oh well. We had a good run.

I'll meet you in Vegas

[JakeYYZ]

If you bump into a guy wearing beat-up cowboy boots and a jean jacket while singing “Sympathy for the Devil” (that would be ME), run like hell the other way.

[Dash-Ate]

Who knows if this is man-made or just natural.

No biggie! I heard 6000 people die every year in the mexican drug war...so this flue thing is nothing. And people still vacation in mexico...

The drug companies will make a killing off this though...

[SkyWolfe]

I wonder if this will help get some points on the stock market with the pharmaceutical companies...

[JakeYYZ]

I’d go guns and ammo. Been in RGR, since one week prior to 0’s election. No complaints.

[Invertago]

I wonder if this will help get some points on the stock market with the pharmaceutical companies...

Anything that gets the economy out of the news is good for the economy.

[BibleMonkey]

....CDC officials described the virus as having a unique combination of gene segments not seen before in people or pigs. The bug contains human virus, avian virus from North America and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia....

CIA courier dropped the vial. Clumsy bastard.




Oh well. We had a good run.

I'll meet you in Vegas

No way jose. I'm going to the corn field outside of ...where the hell was it....oh yeah-Saskatoon!

In this blackness time seemed to have no objective meaning. Neither did distance, for that matter; how long was the Lincoln Tunnel, anyway? A mile? Two? Surely it couldn't be two miles under the Hudson River. Let's say a mile. But if a mile was all it was, he should have been at the other end already. If the average man walks four miles an hour, he can walk one mile in fifteen minutes and he'd already been in this stinking hole five minutes longer than that.

"I'm walking a lot slower," he said, and jumped at the sound of his own voice. The lighter dropped from his hand and clicked onto the catwalk. The echo spoke bac, changed into the dangerously jocular voice of an approaching lunatic.

" ... lot slower ... lower ... lower ..."

"Jesus," Larry muttered, and the echo whispered back: "zuss ... zuss ... zuss ..."

He wiped a hand across his face, fighting panic and the urge to give up thought and just run blindly forward. Instead he knelt (his knees popped like pistol shots, frightening him again) and walked his fingers over the miniature topography of the pedestrian catwalk - the chipped valleys in the cement, the ridge of an old cigarette butt, the hill of a tiny tinfoil ball - until at last he happened on his Bic. With an inner sigh he squeezed it tightly in his hand, stood up, and walked on.

Larry was beginning to get himself under control again when his foot struck something stiff and barely yielding. He uttered an inhalatory sort of scream and took two staggering steps backward. He made himself hold steady as he pulled the Bic lighter from his pocket and flicked it. The flame wavered crazily in his trembling grasp.

He had stepped on a soldier's hand. He was sitting with his back against the tunnel wall, his legs splayed across the walkway, a horrible sentinel left here to bar passage. His glazed eyes stared up at Larry. His lips had fallen away from his teeth and he seemed to be grinning. A switchblade knife jutted jauntily from his throat.

The lighter was growing warm in his hand. Larry let it go out. Licking his lips, holding the railing in a deathgrip, he forced himself forward until the toe of his shoe struck the soldier's hand again. Then he stepped over, making a comically large stride, and a kind of nightmarish certainty came over him. He would hear the scrape of the soldier's boots as he shifted, and then the soldier would reach out and clasp his leg in a loose cold grip.

In a shuffling sort of run, Larry went another ten paces and then made himself stop, knowing that if he didn't stop, the panic would win and he would bolt blindly, chased by a terrible regiment of echoes.

When he felt he had himself under some sort of control, he began to walk again. But now it was worse; his toes shrank inside his shoes, afraid that at any second they might come in contact with another body sprawled on the catwalk ... and soon enough, it happened.

He groaned and fumbled the lighter out again. This time it was much worse. The body his foot had struck was that of an old man in a blue suit. A black silk skullcap had fallen from his balding head into his lap. There was a six-pointed star of beaten silver in his lapel. Beyond him were another half a dozen corpses: two women, a man of middle age, a woman who might have been in her late seventies, two teenage boys.

The lighter was growing too hot to hold any longer. He snapped it off and slipped it back into his pants pocket, where it glowed like a warm coal against his leg. Captain Trips hadn't taken this group off any more than it had taken the soldier back there. He had seen the blood, the torn clothes, the chipped tiles, the bullet holes. They had been gunned down. Larry remembered the rumors that soldiers had blocked off the points of exit from Island Manhattan. He hadn't known whether to believe them or not; he had heard so many rumors last week as things were breaking down.

The situation here was easy enough to reconstruct. They had been caught in the tunnel, but they hadn't been too sick to walk. They got out of their car and began to make their way toward the Jersey side, using the catwalk just as he was doing. There had been a command post, machine-gun emplacement, something.

Had been? Or was now?

Larry stood sweating, trying to make up his mind. The solid darkness provided the perfect theater screen on which the mind could play out its fantasies. He saw: grim-eyed soldiers in germproof suits crouched behind a machine gun equipped with an infrared peeper-scope, their job to cut down any stragglers who tried to come through the tunnel; one single soldier left behind, a suicide volunteer, wearing infrared goggles and creeping toward him with a knife in his teeth; two soldiers quietly loading a mortar with a single poison gas canister.

Yet he couldn't bring himself to go back. He was quite sure that these imaginings were only vapors, and the thought of retracing his steps was insupportable. Surely the soldiers were now gone. The dead one he'd stepped over seemed to support that. But ...

But what was really troubling him, he supposed, were the bodies directly ahead. They were sprawled all over each other for eight or nine feet. He couldn't just step over them as he had stepped over the soldier. And if he went off the catwalk to go around them, he risked breaking his leg or his ankle. If he was to go on, he would have to ... well ... he would have to walk over them.

Behind him, in the darkness, something moved.

1978 novel....I wonder if I still have it in my basement someplace...might need to reread it for survival tips...lessee ... cornfield good, bicycles good, ...crows, las Vegas, cowboy boots and jean jackets bad....can't remember the rest

Rats, I'm a goner.

I think the garlic farmers are behind it.

[BibleMonkey]

I wonder if this will help get some points on the stock market with the pharmaceutical companies...

I guess you're right, SkyWolfe

....Roche Holding, the Swiss-based manufacturer of the Tamiflu drug, ended the day up 3.5 per cent, while GlaxoSmithKline, which makes Relenza, also effective against flu, closed up 5.7 per cent.

The rest of the market-which is run by retarded panicky chimpanzees, apparently , is down

North American stock markets closed down Monday after investors struggled to assess the potential impact of the swine flu outbreak.

http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2009/04/2 ... onday.html

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http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articl ... id=2640516

A strategic call to utilize Echinacea-garlic in flu-cold seasons.

Every day I cut one garlic clove into small bits with a sharp stainless steel knife-small enough so you don't have to chew it-and just chunk it back with a glug of water. It does work. My white blood cells just go all Rocky on the Flus ass........