Damned Swines

A small, and to be honest very late update here, I've been working on what seems to have become a university thesis in my free time for the last week. More on that in the future though.

"Swine flu? Has he missed the overly hyped media showboat, 24/7 shitstorm coverage of the impending doomsday?" Not that I could blame you for thinking that, but if you think you know about swine flu from what you've seen covered on the news, then you may as well say you understand personality traits having read The Mr. Men books.

So we've been told that our Government has quarantined all cases found in an effort to stop the spread of swine flu throughout the general population. On the face of it this sound like the most sensible course of action. The last thing we'd want is for a potentially lethal virus to be able to spread freely throughout the general population right?
Wrong. The current form of swine flu is far from lethal in the majority of cases, and history shows us that with the last great pandemic of Spanish Flu came in two waves. The first wave wave an unseasonal mild infection, it was the second wave in the Autumn that was the killer. On it's own this isn't really that important, but couple it with the fact that those who suffered the milder form in the summer had 70% resistance to the later Autumn strain, and I'd hope you see where I'm going. There is nothing to say this won't happen again come the Autumn, when the swine flu will have a chance to swap genes with our normal bout of seasonal flu.

Obviously at first, the worlds governments had no idea as to the the lethality of the swine flu which emerged this year. Soon enough though they did, yet rather than go with the safest course of action and let this mild form spread as much as possible, they chose to continue quarantining anyone with symptoms. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Also, the media ran no coverage i saw explaining that immunity to a deadly pandemic could be bestowed by infection from a milder form, and that the history of pandemics shows us this could happen. Curious.

One of the reasons I'm writing this is because there is an unseasonal infection going round at the moment. The second will become apparent in my next post. I'm not suggesting there is a conspiracy here, it's much more likely that government decided the above would be too complicated for the general population to understand. In fact the EU has been criticised for "missing" potential swine flu cases due to lax screening methods. GP's in the UK will only send a sample to test for swine flu if the person has recently been to Mexico or knows someone who has.

Compared to say the Japanese response this is pretty ridiculous, except if there is a second wave come Autumn.