Hidden within the latest edition of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s
FluView was this sentence: “The proportion of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza was below the epidemic threshold”…
You may recall all those additional deaths we were supposed to suffer as a result of swine flu – 30,000 to 90,000, according to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (a number I previously disputed)…
But like New Zealand and Australia, the United States can actually expect considerably fewer overall flu deaths because of the swine flu…
Only 161 new infections were reported to CDC-monitored labs last week, compared to 11,470 at the epidemic’s mid-October peak.
in addition to the usual bureaucratic desire for growth in power and budget, the WHO was seeking to cover its tracks for an earlier hysteria – that of avian flu. Moreover, it has been remarkably open (Even if I’m the only one to report on it) about seeking to exploit swine flu to engineer hard-left political change including the redistribution of wealth between countries and instituting “social justice.”
The real game here is that the President is trying to give Democrats in Congress political cover for the health-care blowout and tax-increase votes that he knows are coming. The polls are showing that Mr. Obama’s spending plans are far less popular than the President himself, and Democrats in swing districts are getting nervous. The paygo ruse gives Blue Dog Democrats cover to say they voted for “fiscal discipline,” even as they vote to pass the greatest entitlement expansion in modern history. The Blue Dogs always play this double game.
The other goal of this new paygo campaign is to make it easier to raise taxes in 2011, and impossible to cut taxes for years after that. In the near term, paygo gives Mr. Obama another excuse to let the Bush tax cuts he dislikes expire after 2010, while exempting those (for lower-income voters) that he likes. In the longer term, if a GOP Congress or President ever want to cut taxes, paygo applies a straitjacket that pits those tax cuts against, say, spending cuts in Medicare. The Reagan tax reductions would never have happened under paygo.
Brazil and Russia are set to unload U.S. Treasury bonds as they acquire $10 billion each of new International Monetary Fund securities designed to bolster the institution’s aid programs, officials in the countries said Wednesday.
The moves are part of a bid by the so-called BRIC nations — Brazil, Russia, India and China — to play a bigger role at the IMF and other international institutions. The announcements helped push Treasury yields to their highest level this year on concern that rising U.S. debt has hurt T-bill demand among big holders of U.S. dollar reserves.
The AMA opposes government single-payor medical coverage. I worked in different positions in the group medical benefits insurance business for nearly 10 years and Medicare was a disaster. I advised my parents to have supplemental coverage, which they did, and which was invaluable during my father’s last illness. The proposed Obamacare is Medicare, only in bigger scale.
On a single-payor system, there won’t be a supplemental plan.
And it will lead to rationing. Medical rationing is never called that; it takes the form of absurdly long waits for all sorts of treatments.
The A/H1N1 flu outbreak is leading to a potential diplomatic row between China and Mexico, as Chinese health authorities round up and quarantine scores of Mexicans — only one of whom is thus far reported to be sick — as they fly in on business and holiday trips.
Mexico’s foreign minister said Mexican citizens with no signs of infection had been isolated in “unacceptable conditions” in China. Patricia Espinosa told a news conference Saturday that such measures were “discriminatory and ungrounded” and that the government is advising Mexicans to stay away from China.
She also criticized four Latin American countries — Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Cuba — for suspending flights coming from Mexico against the recommendation of the World Health Organization.
More than 70 Mexicans are in isolation around China, according to Mexican officials, and that number is rising as Mexican travelers call in to their embassy to report their plight.
China has been rounding up all travelers aboard an AeroMéxico flight that arrived Thursday in Shanghai from Mexico with a 25-year-old Mexican man, who is now ill with human swine flu in Hong Kong. He is the only known Mexican sufferer in China to date. However, Mexicans on other flights say they have been singled out for harsh treatment.
Gustavo Carrillo, a 36-year-old manager of a Mexican technology company in China who lives in Beijing, was taken off his Continental Airlines plane Saturday and rushed into quarantine at a Beijing hotel. He had traveled to the U.S. from China on a business trip and hadn’t visited Mexico.
Mr. Carrillo said health officials took the temperatures of other passengers after the plane landed, but didn’t check his after they saw his Mexican passport. Instead, they led him down the aisle past gawking passengers. “It was embarrassing and humiliating,” he said.
Mexicans who were on the flight to Shanghai with the 25-year-old flu victim complain about how China has enforced its quarantine, offering little information and only basic medical testing. Among them is a family of five, including three young children, who transited to Beijing. They were roused from their hotel room in the Chinese capital in the early hours of Saturday and whisked to an infectious diseases hospital. There, according to the father, Carlos Doormann, AeroMéxico’s finance director, they were isolated in a room with bloodstained sheets and what appeared to be mucus smeared on the walls.
the relief flight to take stranded Chinese citizens back home from Mexico, announced yesterday, has been canceled because of trouble reaching “landing agreements” with Mexican airport authorities.
What’s in a name? U.S. pork producers are finding that the name of the virus spreading from Mexico is affecting their business, prompting U.S. officials to argue for changing the name from swine flu.
At a news briefing, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack took pains to repeatedly refer to the flu as the “H1N1 virus.”
“This is not a food-borne illness, virus. It is not correct to refer to it as swine flu because really that’s not what this is about,” Vilsack said.
Israeli authorities are not victims of PC-flu-ness, however, calling it the Mexico flu,
Israel has already rejected the name swine flu, and opted to call it “Mexico flu.” Jewish dietary laws forbid eating pork.
But the French don’t want to blame the pigs,
The Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health also objected to the name, saying the virus contains avian and human components and no pig so far has been found ill with the disease.
But hey, some farmers want to call it the North American flu. That way Mexicans, Americans and Canadians (hey!) deflect blame from the piggies.
Clearly one can not catch the flu from eating bacon, which is exactly what I had for breakfast. M’m bacon!
But I digress.
Any variety of flu is a serious illness. Severe cases attack organs of the body and can lead to death. I found out the hard way twelve years ago when I came thisclose to buying the farm from a very severe flu. If you have the flu, this is what you must do:
1. stay home, get in bed and stay there.
2. Continue to take fluids.
3. If you have a high fever, go to the doctor. Insist on Tamiflu.
4. Get back in bed. If you live alone make sure to have a friend or relative drop by every day and check you out in person (Skype phone calls won’t do, thank you).
5. Don’t expect that, no matter how lousy you feel, the flu “will run its course.” You must seek medical attention.
Again, no need to panic over swine flu, H1N1 or whatever name you want to call it. Just know that any kind of flu must be cared for.
In case anyone missed the implication, the announcement then decreed: “The spending bill currently traveling through Congress should again ensure the CDC has the resources it needs.”
UPDATE 2
As always, Scott is only a day or two ahead of the headlines.
