Careful around Mexicans...

[Ares]

BBC NEWS | Americas | Mexico flu 'a potential pandemic'

Heads up

[Nethran]

My brother-in-law's friend has the flu pretty bad. He got checked on Wednesday at the doctors, before they really knew what was going on in Mexico, and they sent him home with some anti-viral medicine that's not working. He hasn't been to Mexico, but he works in a factory and does carpentry work in new homes, so he's probably been around some people who've been there recently. Anywho, who knows how many people haven't cared enough to go get checked out for what they have.

[Pamela]

1917 Flu
This Flu from WWI killed a lot of people.

Another article.
http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20051017.htm

If you do not like reality or history...leave this thread no.

[Nethran]

The Hong Kong Flu was a category 2 flu pandemic caused by a strain of H3N2 descended from H2N2 by antigenic shift, in which genes from multiple subtypes reassorted to form a new virus. This pandemic of 1968 and 1969 killed an estimated one million people worldwide.[5][6][7] The pandemic infected an estimated 500,000 Hong Kong residents, 15% of the population, with a low death rate.[8] In the United States, approximately 33,800 people died.[9]

33,800 isn't all that much, I don't think. Mostly because of this that I read:

The annual flu (also called "seasonal flu" or "human flu") kills an estimated 36,000 people in the United States each year.

I guess we'll have to wait and see with the Swine Flu(which should be renamed, I think). So far the mortality rate is pretty small. 5%-ish?

[Mathalamus]

is it any dangerous to people like me?

and can anyone tell em what the symptoms are? i kow its flu like, but i need to kno the exact kind. i dont want to die.

[Nethran]

Hah.. All of the Canadian and US cases are mild. I don't think anyone's been hospitalized or anything yet. Mexico City has it bad because there's about 30 million people in the city and they didn't know about the virus until it had already spread to a fair amount of people.

The symptoms are the same as the seasonal flu that people always get. Nausea and vomitting, diarhea, fatigue, coughing, chills, etc. If you get it, you'll probably be fine.

I think it hits people in their late teens and twenties the hardest, though, which is odd. If you look at the mortality graphs for the Spanish flu, the one that Pam posted about that killed about 100 million people, the age brackets that had the most deaths were like.. under 5, 23-28, and over 60. Those typically weakest and those typically strongest. Weird.

Like I said though, this isn't like the H5N1, the avian flu. This is much more mild, and something that you should worry a lot less about.


EDIT: Wiki[edia has stats if you want to take a look.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_outbreak