H1N1: crying wolf inside the pigpen
From CNN, Obama declares H1N1 emergency.
President Obama has declared a national emergency to deal with the “rapid increase in illness” from the H1N1 influenza virus.
“The 2009 H1N1 pandemic continues to evolve. The rates of illness continue to rise rapidly within many communities across the nation, and the potential exists for the pandemic to overburden health care resources in some localities,” Obama said in a statement.
Later, the article states,
Since the H1N1 flu pandemic began in April, millions of people in the United States have been infected, at least 20,000 have been hospitalized and more than 1,000 have died, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Yet, Michael Fumento writes, in Swine Flu Piglet ‘Pandemic’,
…total deaths since Aug. 30 from “Influenza and Pneumonia-Associated” illness are 2,029 reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Web site FluView. But only 292 of those have been laboratory-confirmed as flu of any type. (And yes, people die of pneumonia from many causes other than flu.) By comparison, the CDC estimates about 260 Americans die each day from “regular” flu during each season.
While our first inclination might be to ask, “What’s going on here?”, perhaps we should, instead, be concerned with what might happen in the future if we come face to face with a genuine wolf.
Tagged with: crying wolf • H1N1 • pandemic • swine flu
Filed under: Government • Medicine • Rusty
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My brother got infected with H1N1 or Swine Flu in Mexico. He got a mild fever and luckily he did not die.
Hey Jude,
My nephew got the Swine Flu, just before Thanksgiving. The point of my post wasn’t that no one was getting it, or that it isn’t potentially deadly, but that it wasn’t anywhere close to being the pandemic it was touted to be. We would do well to inquire as to any political motives behind the scare-mongering regarding the Swine (H1N1) Flu.