Swine flu

July 13th, 2009

Swine flu is definitely with us but is it as bad as the media has made out?  We get a blow by blow account of every death that happens with Swine flu, so far the UK is up to 17 deaths.  If you look at normal flu, the yearly epidemic can cause deaths of up to 500,000.

It feels like the media have taken Swine flu and tried to scare people with it just to sell papers.  I am always sceptical about anything the papers say, typing in swine flu headlines into Google brings up all sorts of different stories.  Swine flu is going to start teaming up with lots of different other diseases to kill us, or how it is going to spread out of control and kill loads of people.

We have had SARS, avian flu and now swine flu.  Every time the newpapers have splashed massive headlines in an attempt to panic people into buying their paper.  It is ridiculous because panic isn’t what we need.  My wife works in a school where 3 people are infected and the kids are terrified they are going to die from it and it is the medias fault.

Because of the panic the Government has sent out a massive number of leaflets to everyone to try and calm the public.  It was a complete waste of money but it just goes to show how quickly the Government can act if it needs to, and that money could have been spent in a much better way improving the NHS in some way.

I have been doing a little bit of reading about Swine flu and I didn’t realise that there had been outbreaks before.  In 2007 there was an outbreak in the Philippines where pig were infected and we did not hear about that, I guess they got off lucky as something like that could affect the whole tourist trade of the Philippines and also the value of real estate.

Well now the whole country is going to be immunised to try and contain it which will be something to look forward to.  I guess with all the travel this is going to be a common occurrence as the more people travel the more diseases are going to spread.

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