Expert warns against flu media hype (Israel get's it!)

The World Health Organization gave daily briefings and set the alert to the next-to-the-highest level.

However, today these morality figures appear to have been highly exaggerated by the Mexican authorities, whose health system is not among the best. Now, Israeli epidemiologists are worried not about an unusually high mortality rate but about its relatively quick spread to other countries due to airline passengers on tours going home from Mexico.

"The damage from media exaggeration may be larger than the damage from the disease itself," said Green before the opening on Wednesday of a University of Haifa conference on avian flu. He said the new flu strain combined human, pig and avian viruses and that it would take months before a vaccine was prepared and marketed to fight the strain. But it was not more virulent than ordinary flu strains for which annual vaccines are available each winter, he declared.

Flu of all kinds primarily posed danger to the very young, the old and the chronically ill with weak immune systems, he said. In addition, healthy workers who contracted flu miss work, thus causing economic problems.

Some of the media exaggerated the story and made it more dramatic, causing unnecessary panic, Green said.

My Fellow Conservatives...Don't Fall for the Hype!!!

Swine Flu — It’s Not the Killer You Think It Is

Only 7 swine flu deaths, not 152, says WHO

It's the flu, folks, not the plague

Dr. Peter Duesberg several years ago on the endless hysteria created around a myriad of "impending" flu pandemics that never materialize:

"The reason why the Flu was so successful in 1918 was primarily the “terrain”, namely the millions of immuno-deficient hosts and hostesses starved and stressed by 4 years of war.

Secondarily, one can speculate that the 1918 flu strain may also have been a “new” recombinant to the 1918 population and thus more successful than a more established seasonal strain may have been. As I found in 1968, flu, unlike practically all other animal viruses, has multiple RNA segments, equivalent to multiple chromosomes and thus can readily form new recombinants - the reason why we have seasonal flus, but have measles, mumps, polio, pox etc. only once in a lifetime.

Thirdly, the odds that the Centers for Disease Control alias World Health Organization ever predicts an epidemic prior to its arrival are not good: They have predicted in past several years numerous epidemics or “pandemics” such as the flu, the hanta-virus, anthrax, the rotavirus, the Ebola virus, the West Nile virus, “mad cow” epidemic, the Sars-virus epidemic, an epi-pandemic of “random, eg. heterosexual non-drug user-AIDS” - but none of these ever materialized (see, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery publishing, Washington DC, 1996). The last one that came close to an epidemic was polio in the 1950s and that was not predicted by American public health scientists.

Fourth, the currently hyped prospective Flu pandemic has long missed its chances. It has been hyped almost daily in the San Francisco Chronicle since November. But all that happened was a dead chicken in Nigeria, a hamster in Germany, two sick (dead?) kids in Turkey, a euthanized swan in Sweden, several dead or euthanized chicken in Iraq (Yes Iraq!!) etc. That is not the pattern of a potential killer microbe. All “new” killer viral or microbial epidemics of the past have spread exponentially within weeks to months and then declined exponentially owing to the induction of immunity or death of susceptible hosts - take Albert Camus’ “Plague” as a classical example.

The current Flu propaganda is thus a mix of ignorance and and self-interest and an exploitation of general ignorance by the CDC, WHO, the vaccine, pill and test-kit manufacturers of our universities and pharma companies, and of our “science” journalists, who need to fill their daily columns - and must sell their aging vaccine stocks before they decompose and their Tamiflu pills before the summer. But despite hyping in dozens of microbial Godots - no Godot has come since polio. People are just too well nourished these days, and thus have optimally maintained immune systems, for microbes to attack more than just the fringes of the ever growing human herd. That in fact is their historical share. The 150 million+ Flu pandemics are hype for fund raising by the ever more costly science/health armies in search for real enemies. Their success is based on the invisible monsters of the microbial epidemics of the (earlier) times, when nutrition lacked vitamins, proteins and sanitation or was lacking all together - and on the never failing microbial and viral horror phantasies of our science writers, politicians and Hollywood producers.

Regards, Peter."

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