Like most of I too have been following these reports...
Now where I live... just like they said it would... it targets young adults.... Where I live the youngest victim is 14 the oldest 27. leaving another dozen cases evenly spread between 19 20 22, 23 year olds...

Now I have no proof but reason dictates that 30+ years ago H1N1 had to have gone around otherwise we older folks would be getting it too. well maybe not H1N1 itself, but an early variant that give us some immunity...

I know in other places there are older people who have come down with it but the numbers are so small as to be anomalous.

If that truly is the case then one can assume either a mostly harmless virus has turned rogue or someone tweaked that harmless virus and made it worse... don't kid yourselves companies tweak viruses all the time and not to long ago there was a story of do it at home bio engineering done in basements and garages... just a few months ago we debated what would happen if someone changed a harmless virus...

I'm starting to think the odds are pretty damn good that's what were seeing here

Excerpt from Ap story from DEC 2008 to jog your memorries

The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself.

In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.

"People can really work on projects for the good of humanity while learning about something they want to learn about in the process," she said.

So far, no major gene-splicing discoveries have come out anybody's kitchen or garage.

But critics of the movement worry that these amateurs could one day unleash an environmental or medical disaster. Defenders say the future Bill Gates of biotech could be developing a cure for cancer in the garage.

Just maybe it wasnt a cure they did find???

Originally posted by Blueracer
A victim from Mexico that was in Texas was just a baby. So much for your theory.

Not at all that was a clear case of his parents poor care of a sick child... the little guy had a high fever chills the whole works... and what did they do? rush him off to the doctors for treatment? Heck no they took the kid to a mall and went shopping... sorry his case doesn't fit... and is discounted due to lack of basic care

[edit on 4-5-2009 by DaddyBare]

What do you think mutations do? Just give it a new name?

It changes the whole genetic makeup of the virus, and one of the traits that could be affected is the range of the target population. Just like how mutations can change the symptoms of the virus.

So it's actually not surprising that it reacts with the immune system differently.

You do know that the reason young people are dying more is because it's not the virus making people SO sick and dying, it's the body's immune reaction to the virus.

So if someone has a stronger immune system, like most people between say 18 and 40, they actually get more sick because their immune system is fighting the virus harder.

That sort of thing can absolutely develop as a trait in the virus from a mutation.

H1N1 is not new. This one has a lot of similarities of the 1918 Flu as well as the 1976 Fort Dix flu. It's not exactly the same of course .. but they are all related.


Quotes from "The Coming Plague"
By Laurie Garrett (written in 1994)

Chapter Six ... Swine Flu

A hallmark of the great 1918-10 influenza pandemic was the virus's ability to kill young adults and children. ....

The influenza virus was otherwise well protected by a tough protein-and-fat armor made of two layer sof viral enveloping: one layer was almost entirely composed of the human heart's nemesis, cholesterol. ....

The virus (1918 Flu) appears to have swept the world in three waves, over less than two years time, gaining virelence with each new assault.....

The appearance of the Fort Dix virus, dubbed A/Newjersey/H1N1 caused consideralbe anxiety inside the U.S. Public Health Service. "By every available scientific measure, the Shope strain was indistinushable from the 1918 strain, and also indisinguishable from the Fort Dix strain." ...

... influenza viruses unusually rich in neuraminidase proteins were more easily spread from person to person. ...

Several scientists argued that swine strains, in particular, appeared in 90-100 year cycles ...

... there had been a long spring-to-summer silence (of the flu) following the first flu outbreaks of 1918 - a silence that was followed in September by the greatest pandemic of the early twentieth century. "To decide not to do something, to decide to go on pause because the virus went on pause, " Osborn argued in long conference alls to fellow scientists, "would be utterly irresponsible." ....

Swine influenzas, Cox would later explain, were particularly worrisome because peigs were highly permissive hosts, capable of harboring influenzas froma wide range of animals, birds, and humans. Inside the swine, variuos influenza strains shared genes, and recombined, resulting in major antigen shifts. ...

Stated as certainties, rather than hypothetical conjectures, were the following points listed under the memo's heading "FACTS" : The virus found at Fort Dix is 'antigenically related to the influenza virus which has been implicated as the cause of the 1918-19 pandemic which killed 450,000 American people; every American undre the age of fifty 'is probably susceptible to this new strain"; severe flu epidemics occur at approximately ten year intervals." ....

... (1918) influenza deaths were usually produced not by the virus but secondarily by bacterial infections that took advantage of the weakened immune defenses of influenza-infected lunchs. Bacterial penumonia ...

... a minimum of 85 percent of high-risk populations would have to be vaccinated to ensure society's protection against an analogous epidemic ....

This flu has been around, in 1918. This is the spanish flu. However we had to dig someone up to get the virus back. Its been dead and gone for a long time.