WHO maintains 2 bln estimate for likely H1N1 cases

WHO maintains 2 bln estimate for likely H1N1 cases

www.reuters.com

GENEVA, Aug 4 (Reuters) - The World Health Organisation stuck on Tuesday to its statement that about two billion people could catch H1N1 influenza by the time the flu pandemic ends.

But the estimate comes with a big health warning: no one knows how many people so far have caught the new strain, known as swine flu, and the final number will never be known as many cases are so mild they may go unnoticed.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Well... there you have it folks....

So was the swine flu "CREATED TO SCARE US?"

I dunno... was the 1918 flu created to scare us?

How about the bubonic plague of the dark ages?

You can put your head in the sand all you want... but be ready...

So what do we do? Take the vaccine?

What are you going to do?

www.reuters.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

i plan to make me and my hubby as healthy as possible by natural means such as diet, etc.
We do not plant to take the vaccine. There isn't enough and we're not in the high priority group anyway.

Originally posted by FunSized
i plan to make me and my hubby as healthy as possible by natural means such as diet, etc.
We do not plant to take the vaccine. There isn't enough and we're not in the high priority group anyway.

i agree, if you just make urself as healthy as can be, thats alot more safer than any vaccine..

it wasn't created to scare us.

it was created to KILL us.

all the population reductionists might get their wish. i just hope it isn't you or one of your loved ones.

For a virus created to "kill us" it's remarkably ineffective.

If I were going to engineer a supervirus to kill everyone, I'd definitely make it have a much higher mortality rate than swine flu does.

Even if 2 billion people get it, there will be very few that die from it without prior health issues. This is not to say it isn't bad, but perspective = good.

Some people are overlooking the point that the great concern isn't that we'll have 2 billion people who get the H1N1 that's been going around lately. The real concern is that this virus will mutate into a far deadlier strain when it reappears in the Fall. This is what is worrisome. This is what the virus did in the Great Pandemic.

*IF* this virus mutates as feared, then the whole nature of the illness changes. Ordinary flu is most dangerous to the very old and the very young, and people whose immune systems have been impaired. The flu they're worried about has this concern, but also the concern that it will trigger off what is called a "cytokine storm" in healthy people, causing their bodies's immune systems to attack their own tissues. That's what kills the healthy, young people - their own, robust immune systems.

The reason why this is considered frightening is because scientists don't have any solid understanding about what it is that made the Pandemic flu so deadly - what mutation it was that caused peoples's immune systems to turn against the body. They can't predict whether this will happen in this coming epidemic, because they don't have enough information. They're seeing the similarities to the Pandemic flu, and they're scared.

This is almost certainly not some sort of deliberately-created virus intended to kill millions of people to depopulate the earth. It's not particularly effective. Even if we have a complete reappearance of the deadly pandemic of 1918, the population won't decrease that much. Almost everyone survived the Pandemic. Almost everyone will survive this one, should it come.

To put it into perspective. The Black Plague may have killed more people than H1N1 did in 1918; but Plague took decades to do it, over 100 years. The Pandemic killed most of its victims in a few months. Had that Pandemic continued on a yearly basis, then it would have been much worse than the Plague by now. But it didn't. If killed millions, then it went away. And we don't know why it did either.

I would maybe go with it being "man-made", in the sense that our vast farming of meat animals almost guarantees that diseases will flash through the animals and eventually cross over to us. Acres upon acres of animals (swine, chickens, cattle) crowded in filthy, unhealthy conditions, is extremely dangerous to us. Any organism that infects one animal, can infect millions. It's a perfect breeding ground for disease, and we are vulnerable to some of those diseases.

You *could* say it's Nature's response to our subjecting so many hundreds of millions of animals to such inhumane conditions. We create a diseased, horrific condition, and it sickens not only our animals, but ourselves.