Remember during the stimulus bill debates, when a section containing $420M for pandemic flu prevention were removed after Republicans screamed "pork"? The response to SARS is what prevented a pandemic and had H5N1 spread human-to-human, the preparation for a response would have limited its scope. This was extremely short-sighted.
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Originally Posted by pan6467
UNLESS, of course it is some man made virus that some secret society made to kill off a certain population.
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Michael Savage has already assured his listeners that this was engineered by al-Qaeda. I'm sure his faith in homeopathy will keep him safe, though.
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Originally Posted by rBGH
If they start using terms like cytokine storm, then I'll get worried.
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I have bad news for you. The deaths in Mexico were in the 20-40 age group. There are two likely causes for that. the first is that people in that age group are the most social and likely to have close contact. The second is cytokine storms. Nothing official yet, but I get the feeling we'll be hearing conclusive results tomorrow.
It's also worth noting that after new studies, some are proposing that the reason 1918 was so deadly was secondary pneumonia infections rather than CSs, but that's going to take a lot more research before anything conclusive comes out.
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Originally Posted by genuinegirly
We're visiting relatives in California the first couple of weekends in May, flying through LAX. We're getting flu shots before we go.
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Unfortunately, CDC estimates as of Saturday had the effectiveness of this year's flu shot against this strain as being low. They did say that it might help, especially if the virus mutates, so there's no reason not to get it.