reply to post by Ignorance Denied
Chart is a bit misleading. Swine Flu is merely 1 STRAIN of the Influenza virus, yet is compared to Cancer deaths despite there being a near complete
A to Z list of different types and classifications of Cancer.. Cardiovascular disease is by
far and away the highest killer on your list... but from what causes? Stroke? Heart Attack? Ruptured valve? The two major killers in Africa are TB
and Malaria, often are related in death toll with AIDs. HIV doesn't actually kill you, it just compromises your immune system to something else ends
up killing you. So it's listing on there is a bit of a misnomer.
That chart is not to be accepted without closer scrutiny. Still, H1N1 death rates aren't yet even over typical flu mortality rates IIRC. Current
mortality rates aren't the concern... it's the potential. The virus may never mutate into a form which reaches a mortality rate even close to the
regular seasonal flu strains. The concern is over how it can be deadly to even healthy young people. The idea is prevention, to try to keep a handle
on it so it won't get that chance to possibly mutate into something more virulent.
While medicine can create an environmental selector to be overcome (by infectious bacteria such as MRSA), remember that evolution works with two prior
co-requirements being Reproduction and Mutation. Contain the spread of the virus, limit it's population growth to controlled levels, and we can
better estimate the course of it's evolution.
(The major problem with Influenza is that it has these spike like structures on it's outside called hemagglutinin which the virus uses to attach
itself to host cells. Since the the hemagglutnin's functionability is not extremely rigid, or conserved, mutations are free to build up that cause
modifications in these structures. These act as a decoy for the immune system by preventing our antibodies from developing immunities to the conserved
proteins like the M2e ion channel targeted in the universal flu vaccine. The influenza virus cannot easily mutate that structure to overcome immunity
without crippling the functionality of the virus.)
Influenza virus - Molecular Expressions Cell Biology



