flu

Since when is 20 people a pandemic?

I've never had any kind of flu to any serious degree - I get the sniffles, achy muscles, fatigue, and possibly a low-grade fever, and it's never lasted more than three or four days.

I've always just called it a cold.

I've also found that a good splif will make all of the symptoms go away. ;-)

Thanks, Rich

According to this 60 dead and 1000 infected in Mexico, and infections of the same strain reported in Texas and California:

You seem to have missed the point. This flu, like the 1918 flu, is much worse in otherwise healthy young adults than those normally considered more vulnerable. In other words if you don't normally get flu you could actually be more at risk from this strain.

Public health officials are particularly jumpy about the flu because of the 1918 pandemic, and because of the lead time they need to develop a virus. Here you have the flu -- that mild old thing -- that suddenly kills at least one in ten people absolutely everywhere. It literally decimated the entire world; talk to anyone who was alive in the 30's and they'll tell you about aunts and uncles and grandparents that they never met because they died in the pandemic.

In a sense it was like that wino on the corner who always asks you for spare change suddenly pulling out an M-16 and gunning down a crowd.

So they tend to consistently overreact, in hopes of getting it right when the real thing happens.

It's interesting that most folks wouldn't think of a 90 percent survival rate as "decimated". Some accounts say The Black Death took 1 in 3.

Current evidence points to Patient Zero for "The Spanish Flu" coming from a US Army training camp in Kansas. Deployment to the European Theatre and modern troop transport kicked things into high gear worldwide.

This latest bug's ease of cross-species (actually cross-order) infection (wild bird to pig to domestic fowl to human) is what should have all of us deeply concerned. Jet travel shortens the necessary response time even more.

Well I caught a nasty one last december. Troubled me for over 5 weeks of which several days with high fever.

But it is the original, exact denotation of the word -- a punishment used to quell mutinies by ordering the death of one in every ten. I tend to avoid the word when talking about things rather than people, but accept a broad interpretation when talking about peoples.

Jon

Its always the US, spanish flue, big depresion in the 30's, current recession and probably this new flu strain as well ;)

For pits sake, stop it, guys ;)

The word refers to the Roman practice of punishing a group by executing every 10th person.

Cheers, James Arthur

Having 600m people die in the space of a year or so would certainly put things in perspective. Maybe global warming and AIDS would drop out of the headlines.

Must have been some shuffling for position in the ranks...

It hasn't infected or killed enough people yet to be a particularly promising contender.

The death rate - in Mexico - is high enough to make it a player, but it may not be sufficiently infectious to make it into the big league. There do seem to have been some cases in the U.S.A. but they haven't killed anybody yet. Infectious viruses do mutate pretty rapidly, and get selected for higher infectiousness and lower mortality - dead and seriously ill patients don't infect other people as effectively as those who can still move around, so it is possilbe that the strain that has crosed the border less lethal.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The regular flus kill many more than that each year already.

Flu is nasty business. I used to think "flu" meant sniffles and a little fever. That's a cold. Then I got the flu for real-- four days of delirium, high fever, spewing from both ends, sweats, and even my hair hurt. THAT's the flu.

(Where'd I get it? Visiting a hospital!)

Cheers, James Arthur

Most folks must be unaware of the origin of the word.

That pathway is fairly common

wikipedia suggests they were divided into groups of 10 and then each 10 selected one of their number by lot.

Which is ironic, because the original meaning of decimate is exactly to kill one in ten. It comes from a Roman practice of disciplining unruly or cowardly cohorts killing one in ten of them. They were split into groups of ten and drew lots to determine which one the other nine would have to kill. See for example:

These days it has technical meanings in signal processing that amount to subsampling 1 in N either in frequency or time.

That would be tertimation. I doubt if the word exists.

US soldiers from a continental climate didn't exactly get on with living in cold damp UK winters under canvas. The flu killed more of them than the Germans did.

If not contained very quickly the virus will travel much faster round the world than we can make sensible amounts of vaccine.

Regards, Martin Brown

It was an interesting dynamic: it raged around the world and then disappeared in about two years.

The 1918 virus has been recovered from a burial site in Alaska. I wonder if the population is still susceptible to it.

John

It also is, I believe, a new version of the virus that was being worried about last year. This makes it very bad news. A bird flu isn't covered by the standard flu shot that many people got. Bird eggs are used to bread up the virus to make the flu shot. It doesn't work with a bird flu.

"decimated" means to kill one in ten.

I read something, somewhere, that claimed that some major contributing factors were things like overcrowding, lack of sanitation, and the fact that there is no drug that will combat viruses. Wasn't there some war going on, with groups of GIs packed into hospitals, infecting each other?

If any virus were _that_ virulent, why didn't it kill _everybody_? Obviously, people have different efficacies of their immune systems.

Thanks, Rich