Harper's Weekly on Swine Flu
Lots of great stuff in the latest Harper's Weekly, including this paragraph about the swine flu hullabaloo:
Swine flu, renamed under pork-lobby pressure to "influenza A (H1N1) virus, human," and referred to as "killer Mexican flu" by anti-immigration activists, had infected 985 people, or 0.0000145 percent of the world's population. Twenty countries reported infections; one death from the flu was confirmed in the United States; and 25 people had died in Mexico, where a cute five-year-old boy named Edgar Hernandez was presented to the media as "patient zero." Mexico shut down for five days to contain the illness, China began to quarantine Mexicans, and Vice President Joe Biden appeared on television and counseled U.S. citizens to avoid airplanes, subways, and classrooms, which led to protests by the travel industry. "I think the vice president misrepresented what the vice president wanted to say," explained Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Egypt, which has no cases of the flu, ordered all its pigs killed, especially slum pigs; police at Manshiyat Nasr slum fired tear gas and rubber bullets at rioting Coptic Christian pig farmers. Geneticists continued to sequence the flu's genes. "Atgaaggcaa tactagtagt tctgctatat," read the opening line of the segment-four hemagglutinin gene. "Acatttgcaa ccgcaaatgc agacacatta."Harper's Weekly on Swine Flu
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Silly Egypt. If Allah didn't want us to eat pigs, he wouldn't have made them out of delicious bacon.
**quietly takes several steps away from @#1 Brainspore**
Best part of the article is further down where it reads "...and a food-service industry survey found that schoolchildren would like to replace lunch ladies with robots."
Schoolchildren are in much better shape than I thought.
@ Voodoo #2:
The same poll showed that schoolchildren would like to replace school buses with rocket ships.
Told ya.
Swine flu? oh you mean HAMTHRAX!
Damn, my bet was on Hispanic Bacon Lung as the officially adopted name for the virus...
When it comes to swine flu, sometimes its best to turn to the bible. The Perry Bible Fellowship, that is:
http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF010-Instant_Bacon.gif
Riveting. IT SPEAKS! IT SPEAKS!
I'm reckoning it would likely be better to get this v1.0 weedy industrial pig farm flu (IPFF) and get a bit of immunity ready for when it storms back later in the year. But then I like me a disaster scenario.
(Having trouble with the captcha here guys - how do you put in fractions such as five and seven eighths in figures?
@6
My great-grandfather was a Kentucky bacon miner. The bacon lung is what finally got him. So sad, so sad. But at least he died happy.
I haven't been able to find an explanation as to why, as recent as last week, the flu death count in Mexico was at least 149 in all reports. Suddenly, at the beginning of this week, everyone has been reporting that only 25 people in Mexico have died. Poof, all of a sudden, as if that had always been the case.
I understand inaccurate estimates, but when and how did the number get revised so drastically? I have yet to find any explanation in the media as to what happened, or even any mention of the death count differences between last week and this week. I feel like I'm in a Twilight Zone episode.
Minor nitpick: This is the Weekly Review from Harper's Magazine.
Harper's Weekly was something altogether different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper%27s_Weekly
#11: The difference is between confirmed and suspected deaths. Last week they used the suspected death numbers to scare the piss out of us. When it became obvious that it wasn't a big deal, they quietly switched to confirmed numbers to backpedal from their doomsaying. I'll wager the size, prominence and specific wording of those reports changed significantly at the same time as well.
So which anti-immigration activists are calling it "killer Mexican flu"? The article doesn't say and when one clicks on the link in the article a list of unreleated articles are displayed.
Hah. Quoting a gene sequence in an article is, indeed, a wonderful thing.
Hi Masomenos: If you can convince Harper's Weekly to stop calling Harper's Weekly Harper's Weekly, I'll stop, too.
http://boingboing.net/harpers-weekly.gif
THE SKY IS FALLING THE SKY IS FALLING!
H-1-N-1
Thousand miles an hour
We're coughin' through the bassdrum
I hope we don't get none
Hamthrax.
A week ago Monday, I got an email at work wanting to know whether I planned to travel to one of the states that had reported a possible infection. Thursday they revised that to tell us all your travel plans for the rest of the year,since our state now has reported cases. Today I received an email requiring me to rewatch a video on pandemic flu that we were required to watch just a few months ago. We were also told to make sure we told the timekeeper our symptonms if we called in sick, because "they don't want to disinfect your work area if you've got a broken leg. Certainly my corner of the Army is in full ZOMG panic mode.
If the name of swine flu, which started with pigs, was changed to Influenza A due to pressure from the Porky Pork lobby, what lobby managed to have the flu of 1918, that started in Kansas, named "Spanish flu" instead of Kansas flu??
@ Rio #21:
I was just reading about that, it's just one of those quirky twists of fate that was no doubt helped along with a healthy dose of anti-Spaniard sentiment at the turn of the last century.
The short version of the story is that Spain was neutral during WWI, which meant that it had a free press while neighboring countries were highly censored. So even though most of the flu cases weren't coming from Spain, most of the REPORTS of the pandemic were.
It may be funny now that we've dodged the bullet but a true influenza pandemic would be no laughing matter and it's a case of when, not if.
Also, atgaaggcaa tactagtagt tctgctatat.
"Atgaaggcaa tactagtagt tctgctatat,"
hemagglutinin sounds like popeye laughing??? i woulda thunk it sounded like bluto...
@ Anonymous 23
You're absolutely right: A swine flu epidemic could be a catastrophe of aporkalyptic proportions.
Thank you! Thank you!
My girlfriend's a geography teacher and this week she was teaching some 14 year old kids about diseases. Asked to name the world's biggest killer pretty much all of them agreed it was Swine Flu.
Not that surprising if they find out about the world from the TV news - when was the last time you heard a newsreader mention malaria or diarrhea?
Just wear gloves when you eat bacon. Problem solved