Is the world overreacting to swine flu?

The Indiana health commissioner says don’t shake hands with anyone. Vice President Joe Biden said try to avoid subways or planes, (although he backpedaled later). And people are buying up protective face masks left and right.

Maybe a pandemic is in fact on its way — some reputable experts think as much. But maybe the much-cited example of the millions-killing Spanish flu of 1918 is less a guide to our immediate health future than the swine flu scare of 1976.

Gerald Ford was president that year. He got caught up in the panic, spent $135 million on production of a vaccine, urged people to get shots and even appeared on TV getting a shot himself.

That was a brave thing to do, as it turned out. While the flu didn’t kill anyone in the United States, the shots did kill 25 who contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome from them. It’s reported that this current flu is dissimilar in a variety of ways.

The last time I looked, Mexico was reporting more than 2,000 cases and 170 deaths (although the World Health Organization said confirmed fatalities were in single digits). There had been one death in the U.S. — a Mexican child — but nowhere else. New cases were cropping up in various spots around the world, though not in large numbers. The reported concern was that even if the flu is not yet fiercely virulent — it so far seems mild — it could mutate into something worse.

A voice of wisdom on such issues is Michael Fumento, a science writer. When some scientists were worrying about millions dying almost immediately from bird flu several years back, he calmly looked at the facts and said it just didn’t seem likely. He was right.

Concerning the 1918 flu that did result in millions of deaths, he points out that most died from secondary infections that today could be treated by antibiotics and other medicines that did not then exist.

Fumento gives us some context, too. Seasonal flu hits millions of Americans every year, leaving an estimated 36,000 dead. Those who die from flu are usually the least healthy among us, which is why flu fatalities are far more likely in undeveloped than in developed countries.

President Barack Obama is seeking $1.5 billion to develop a vaccine for the new flu, demonstrating, among other things, how much prices have gone up since Ford’s time. This move on his part may be wise. It could take several months to find something effective, and you don’t want to postpone the effort until you know for sure that this flu’s dangers merit the investment. Actually administering the vaccine still might not be advisable after you got it, though.

This much seems sure — such decisions should not be driven by speculative fear, possibly giving us a cure worse than the disease. The overly prompt warnings from some countries about not coming to the United States are themselves worrisome.

While I pretend to no insight into the flu other than what I read, I do know that news outlets exaggerate. I know that politicians overstate things. And I know that unintended consequences time and again wreck the best-laid plans of mice and men.

— Jay Ambrose of Colorado is a former, Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas and Denver. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.

My fellow conservatives, don't Fall for the Hype!!!

To see how are enemies in the socialist public health establishment are playing us just like they are playing us re: global warming/climate change, see the following (and esp. my profile page)!

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

It's the flu, folks, not the plague

The Medical CIA

The following email blast from Dr. Peter Duesberg several years ago on the endless hysteria created around a myriad of "impending" flu pandemics that never materialize is also instructive:

"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.

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