"If it bleeds, it leads." That's the general rule adhered to by the mainstream press -- and nothing jumps off the front page like a good doomsday scenario. Remember Y2K? SARS? The Avian flu? Weapons of mass destruction? So, you can understand why I'm not surprised that this whole "swine flu" scare has been blown way out of proportion.For example, The Canadian Press is reporting that China's mainland has confirmed its fourth case of swine flu. That's four cases out of over 1.3 billion people. This is what qualifies as international news?
The frustrating aspect of this fiasco is that this particular strain of influenza is no more potent than those which contribute to about 250,000 to 500,000 deaths worldwide each year. Still, that hasn't stopped Reuters from reporting that U.S. health officials are concerned that "the 5,123 confirmed and probable cases and six deaths in the United States" are just the "tip of the iceberg."
I'm sure it's reports like these that have prompted the World Health Organization to keep the alert against this particular flu strain at phase 5, with phase 6 being the worst. Did anyone happen to mention to the WHO that approximately 15 million children died from starvation last year? Or that 46 million kids were murdered by abortion? Where are those headlines?
5 comments:
rant on Hunny Bun!!!!
See you soon
Hey Jinglebritches - what are you doing callin' my hubs hunny bun?? haha
What's wrong with Honey Buns. I love 'em.
The whole swine flu thing drove me crazy. I kept saying, how does the fatality of this compare to the regular flu and no one in the media was covering it. Until a few weeks later, when it finally came out that the regular old flu kills like 30, 000 people annually compared to the swine flu's small number of deaths. We live in a small town that has seen an influx of immigrants in the last ten years, many of them from Central America. To me, the swine flu just gave people another reason to be suspicious of those immigrants. I heard two people ask in the hyped up first weeks how our population might affect our town's susceptibility to the swine flu. Nicely but still, I'm sure there were many thinking and saying it not so nicely.
Preach it, brothah.
The swine flu's mortality rate IS higher than seasonal flu, is it not? Not actual numbers of deaths, but percentage of infected people vs. deaths? That's how I understood it, but maybe I'm listening to HYPE.
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