although I DO think the wave of swine flu that is crossing the nation at this time has thankfully been much milder than what was expected. I'm sure it will morph its way into something more cruel, but hopefully by then we'll have a viable vaccine.

 

Be glad for May instead of january.

 

As Boltonblue implies, many people consider the 1918 flu pandemic to have been worse than the bubonic plague.

The issue here is that no one knows when the next really deadly flu might arise. But it's probably going to be a swine or bird flu that modifies itself just enough to be human-to-human transmissible but not so much that our general flu antibodies can handle it safely.

When the plague first struck, no one expected it was going to be as widespread and as deadly as it ended up being. The same for the 1918 flu.

If the New Orleans levies had held, everyone would have remembered Katrina as a huge false alarm. But when the levies failed, then everyone remembered it as an example of not doing enough to prepare for the disaster in advance. You can't win with these things.

 

So far our state has had a minimum number of cases and most of them have been from U. of Del students who visited Mexico. It always makes sense to be prepared but not to the point of panic as our local paper has implied. We wash our hands reguarly, apply antibacterial lotion to our hands and stay away from people who have flu symptoms. Other than that we just go on with life.

 

Well said!

 

Interest in this thread has waned, as has the media's overall interest in this topic. But one wonders whether that means the topic is "old news" or whether the threat has gone away.

I think that the graph below suggests that the whole thing is a media phenomenon, as has been ssuggested here. Clearly, the number of cases continues to grow -- although we're not seeing an exponential increase now, neither is there any real leveling off (let alone a decline). Further, the growth rate in numbers of cases (the steepness of the curves) is greater now than it was back in late April / early May, when all the hype started.

(I reduced the size to make the picture manageable: the red is WHO world-wide cases of H1N1; the blue is CDC US cases; the time starts at 22 April and the last datapoint is today, May 15.)

 

^ Whatever it takes to bring you out of hiding, Cloudy!

 

I think a lot of the reporting was based on the early death toll coming out of Mexico.
Not to diminish the seriousness of it but now that it is "JUST" a flu, it's not news anymore. eh people got sick, no one died, move on nothing to see here.... NEXT!!!

it also tells me that this fall, may really, really suck when everybody gets bad inside and back to school.
The cat is out of the bag and I don't think they'll be getting it under control until it runs it's natural course.

With numbers of that size you could be getting under reporting of current cases and still be on an exponential growth path.
Also pockets or bursts of exposure could explain aberrations.