hypocaffeinemia

This whole “Swine Flu” pandemic thing has officially jumped the shark. Now schools local to me are closing over “probable (?) cases”. How they determine the cases are probable when the symptoms are…wait for it: identical to the normal friendly endemic influenza strains that kill 36,000+ stateside annually, I’m not sure. Especially when labs are being overwhelmed with samples from everybody and their mother (and their father and their siblings…) that shows up to the ER or the doctor’s office with so much as the sniffles.
Unfortunately, one of the local school closings is about half a mile from my hospital. I haven’t walked by our ER (their lobby is literally a prefab building in the parking lot now), but from talking with some of my esteemed colleagues down in the trailer park (ha!), there’s at least a dozen people with masks and “flu-like” symptoms showing up on any given shift at the moment.

I think the way this entire thing is being handle is particularly egregious. While the WHO and CDC are just doing their jobs by tracking stuff (”pandemic” doesn’t speak of severity, mind you), the way the media has picked up the ball and ran with this is a special sort of stupid. There are plenty of viruses out there to be feared- viruses with high transmission rates, high morbidity, and high mortality- but swine flu isn’t one of them. The very premise of calling it “swine flu” when it’s nothing more than a recombination of several extant Orthomyxoviridae strains– a retrovirus we already well-known to us that mutates so quickly we need annual immunizations just to keep up with its changes– is nearly as criminal as yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.

And so over 25,000 kids across the country are missing school due to a few suspected cases of a new strain of a disease so endemic in our population that most people aren’t even aware of the fact that it kills more people than auto accidents annually.

Of course, no school would ever think of shutting down November-April even while hundreds of children are affected annually. Case in point: My wife’s a teacher. One week this January, roughly 11% of the student body (total pop = 1100) was absent due to a similar GI illness. The district didn’t shut the campus down; the media was not alerted; the CDC did not quarantine our town. Why not? It was easily as severe and as dangerous as the worst of swine flu. It just lacked the hysteria only the media is able to generate.