{"id":4699,"date":"2009-04-30T12:11:33","date_gmt":"2009-04-30T17:11:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4699"},"modified":"2009-04-30T12:20:03","modified_gmt":"2009-04-30T17:20:03","slug":"much-ado-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4699","title":{"rendered":"Much Ado"},"content":{"rendered":"

Swine Flu – subject of the media’s panic du jour – might not be as dangerous<\/a> as the usual strains of flu that bounce around the country every winter:<\/p>\n

As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza — at least in its current form — isn’t shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The H1N1 outbreak (the government is trying to downplay the “Swine” moniker, and “Rosie O’Donnell Flu” hasn’t taken off yet) has killed somewhere between 20 (says the WHO, yesterday) and 100-odd people, mostly in Mexico.\u00a0 This is compared to the 200,000 people hospitalized and 36,000 a year who die of flu-related causes<\/a>, according to the CDC.\u00a0 In other words, in the week that the world has been panicking about this outbreak, 250 people (on average) died of all the other mundane flus, without a single headline.<\/p>\n

Not to downplay the potential <\/em>this flu has to mess things up, and certainly <\/em>not to downplay the tragedy suffered by the families of those who’ve died in this outbreak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Swine Flu – subject of the media’s panic du jour – might not be as dangerous as the usual strains of flu that bounce around the country every winter: As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}