…and this little piggy went “wee wee wee”, and then died of the flu
So, due to reasons explained in my last post, I have been living under a rock for the past several weeks. Preoccupied, busy, overworked, underslept…and apparently losing my grip of the english language. ”underslept”?!
If that even was an actual word, would it be an adjective?
Anyway, now that the swine flu “epidemic” has become newsworthy enough to become the topic of jokes (my favorite: www.doIhavepigflu.com), I am finally hearing about it. And in the last 5 minutes, it’s been upgraded to “pandemic” status.
Pig Flu Pandemic! A pig illness that has mutated and can now spread between humans! Sounds very scary and very contractable! Here are the latest statistics on the damage this “pandemic” has caused:
- 2500 sick people and 160 dead people in Mexico, a country with a population of 109 million people. Of all of those cases, 49 sick people and 7 dead people have been confirmed to have pig flu.
- 100 people sick and 1 person dead of the pig flu in the United States, a country with a population of 304 million people.
- 10 countries have confirmed or suspected cases of pig flu, for a grand worldwide total of 195 confirmed cases.
- 53,000 children in Texas didn’t have to go to school this week because the 1 U.S. fatality occurred in their state and children make excellent vectors.
- $105 Billion requested by President Obama from the Federal Government for the development of vaccines. (That would be $344 million spent PER PERSON in the United States! F*ck the vaccines - just give us the cash!)
Btw - the regular plain old-fashioned FLU flu, which I had two weeks ago, has caused the death of 13,000 people in the U.S. since January. Imagine the cash we could bilk out of the feds for THAT flu if we only had the foresight to panic and give it a silly name. The Keri Flu has been spread to at least 3 people I work with, btw. I must be stopped! Here I am in cahoots with my buddy Swiney, who is now known to the World Health Organization as “Pig Zero”:
Seriously though, why are we panicking? People have been dying of common illnesses for a while now - haven’t we gotten used to the concept yet?
In the olden days, we called these people “sickly people.” They were frail and were treated gently and couldn’t go outside in the winter and they wore depressing gray clothing and always looked pale. At least that’s how they looked in movies about the olden days. They were “sickly”, which meant they got sick easily. Sometimes they died of a simple cold and while everyone was sad, it was acknowledged that they were not exactly strong and healthy to begin with. And now, sickly people are called “immuno-deficient” and they’ve become the barometer of the world’s health.
We don’t like when people die of “simple” illnesses because that means the REST of us could die from it too. The truth is that the rest of us are NOT going to die from the flu. The sickly people die from the flu. It’s sad, but it happens. It’s nature. That might sound cold, but if we were gerbils, we’d eat the sickly ones. Instead, we humans spend billions of dollars on vaccines to give to healthy humans because a couple of sickly people got sick and a few of them died. Can’t we spend billions on making sickly people healthy instead of making healthy people less afraid of things they shouldn’t really be afraid of anyway?
Ok I’m going back under my rock now…I hear there’s a Norwegian Black-footed Sheep Flu that’s about to mutate so that it can be spread to sheep with other colors of feet…a sure sign that it’s going “human-strain” in no time…
