Whatever happened to swine flu?

[Antipathy]

Pig flu was the s**t up until a few months ago. Everybody in my country were taking vaccinations like there was no tomorrow. Some dude I know actually cancelled his vacation to Spain with his girlfriend because he was afraid of the flu - yeah, he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. But this year? Nothing. No one's said anything about the flu. It's like the entire thing disappeared from the face of the earth.

The most interesting thing about this virus is that - unless I'm terribly misguided - contains the DNA of several viruses, including human, swine and bird viruses. It's almost impossible that anything like this would evolve naturally, therefore it's almost certain that the virus was developed by men.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Health_expert:_Swine_flu_outbreak_exaggerated_by_pharmaceutical _companies_for_profits

How much did medical companies make out of the flu? Let's start counting. My country of 5 million spent about 40 million on vaccinations alone. That's 8 euros for each vaccination. Most countries spent even more per capita. If, say, 500 million people are to be vaccinated, each shot costing about 10 euros, it will make the drug companies exactly 5 billion euros. That's alot of money. Not for Obama, but for drug companies, yeah.

How much did the media make out of the flu? That's harder to say. A lot. Media lives off of news. They need new material each day to make viewers watch their channels and read their papers, to make them look at commercials and advertisements, to make media companies money. When something interesting comes up, say, a nuclear reactor blows up because stupid f**kers were in charge, certain charts for the media start skyrocketing. Those charts are very important to media. Those charts are the ones that print money. It's best for them to keep those charts high in the clouds - even if it means blowing things out of proportion, or flat out talk straight bulls**t.

Drug companies know the media effect very well, probably because drug companies are led by smart mother f**kers. All it needs is a few smart scientists to engineer a virus that's like a big, black Hummer H2 - big, scary, shiny, but not really dangerous, fast or even efficient. Then the virus needs to be released in a third world country, preferably full of corruption to make the initial spread work as designed. This country needs to be close to a first world country - nobody gives a s**t if sixty million Africans die every second. People start giving s**t when their fellow citizens are dropping dead.

Doesn't Mexico seem like a good choice? Lots of people, lots of emigrants, lots of tourism, neighbour of the States, bad hygiene, et cetera... release a virus there, and I guarantee you that in a few months, your very own trademark cough will be heard in every nook and cranny of the world. Then, after your nasty biological machine is set free, the final thing you need is a bit of motivation for the media - a little co-operation to throttle up the hype machine. Everybody likes money - especially corporations.

Wait, crap. I wasn't supposed to turn this into a conspiracy theory.

[Graham]

Media clings on to anything they can find to trick/scare people into watching. People got scared. I remember when I was in basic there was a big thing on the news about peanuts being bad and getting people sick. We ate peanut products the entire time and didn't get sick.

[PANZERCATWAGON]

early on in the post ...

It's almost impossible that anything like this would evolve naturally, therefore it's almost certain that the virus was developed by men.

at the end of the post ...

Wait, crap. I wasn't supposed to turn this into a conspiracy theory.

[Blue-ninja]

I dunno man. When the E. Coli outbreak happened in 2006, I was eating spinach grown in our garden at the time. Didn't get sick.

[ValiS]

It was obviously a planned campaign.
All the time people die of normal flu, more than swine flu. Nobody panics about the "usual" flu.
In my country experts said that it was better to get the flu and develop life-long resistance naturally, free of charge, than to get vaccinated and get immunity for a year or so. Still the goverment finally bought the vaccine, after the "epidemic" already was starting to fade. As of now, only about 10 percent of people have been vaccinated, because noone really cares anymore. And they shouldn´t care.

The point is not about conspiracy theories as such, but about which conspiracy theory you should believe: the one that sais the flu was a conspiracy, or the one that sais the flu was actually a horrible dangerous disease.

[jrgp]

It was a IRL meme that stopped being funny.

 I doubt it was a planned stunt to reel in money, since lots of the people/companies who were involved lost lots.

[ValiS]

Someone always has to lose if anyone is to win.

[iDante]

I actually just got over swine flu. Missed some school and everything.

It was rather underwhelming; I've had worse colds.

[Mittsu]

it's not a conspiracy theory, it really appeared to be a world wide scam. WHO changed their definition of pandemia at the time the h1n1 was spreading causing this virus to be classified as pandemic and furthermore, causing world wide panic. That's what i've heard on news, i think it can be easily verified. I didn't give a shit about that virus during all the drama, experts were always saying it's contagious but not really dangerous. But the drug companies made shitloads of money on that.

[VijchtiDoodah]

Here comes Vijchti with SCIENCE.

The Swine Flu was a pandemic: any infectious disease that affects a wide area (a continent, the world) is a pandemic. And there were reported deaths due to this flu worldwide.

There was a very real cause for concern. Any strain of flu is a serious health risk for a large subset of people: the obese, those with diabetes or asthma, those who are immunosuppressed (people with AIDS, certain kinds of cancer and genetic disorders, people who are on immunosuppressive medications for organ transplants), and those with nervous system disorders. Children and the elderly are also particularly susceptible. 250,000 to 500,000 people die from the flu every year.

What made the Swine Flu so frightening was that it was not only as deadly as any other flu, but it was found to be more deadly than usual to healthy, young people. There was much reason to be concerned because the previous times new strains of flu were found to be this deadly, they killed people by the millions.

With these dangers in mind it made sense for children, the elderly, those with the aforementioned conditions, and any person who spends time around any of these at-risk groups of people, to get vaccinated. It's the same with any flu. Except in this case, the flu was actually deadlier than usual.

Luckily, this time around either through our efforts at disease prevention or because the flu turned out to be less infectious than usual, this flu killed much fewer people than expected.

Still, the media did use the scare of infection to drive viewership, just as they do for anything frightening. Can you blame them for capitalizing on sensational news?

[The Geologist]

She blinded me with science!

Sorry, had to say it.  Rock on for bringing that in though - it needed to be said.

This aside, thoughts that something like this must be man made are pretty laughable.  Mother nature can cook up stuff that's orders of magnitude worse than this.  She already has, in fact.  While I don't doubt that there was ample media hype involved (and still is - I'm still hearing radio ads about it), I don't think it was anything more than that.

Then again, the media is supposed to be objective.  Not farming fear.  Maybe if some of the major news organizations stopped focusing on Obama going out for burgers or the first lady picking vegetables from a garden with the most p.c. kids to put on telecision and started focusing on actual news, then we could get some reality.  Yet, alas, what catches the eye is of interest.  If it ain't killing you, it better be entertaining you.

I realize this isn't a 100% situation.  Just sayin' is all.

Even then, probably not.   

[Mittsu]

google "WHO's pandemia definition change"

[dnmr]

Could The Biologist(s) enlighten us on anything about the so-called "second wave" of this virus possibly coming later this year?

[VijchtiDoodah]

google "WHO's pandemia definition change"

I see what you mean. Epidemiologically, this was and is a pandemic. Politically, though, countries are wary of the WHO declaring pandemics because the word is so frightening; they'd rather reserve its use for severely lethal pandemics, which this isn't.

However, the WHO has no real power to do anything. At best, they make recommendations and coordinate efforts to prevent or eradicate disease. Even when the WHO declares different stages of pandemia, it's up to individual countries to act in their best interests.

The reason the WHO gave for changing their definition of a pandemic ran along these lines: since severity of a pandemic cannot be judged on a worldwide scale due to the complications and subtleties of specific areas, the WHO chose to remove its clause about severity and allow governments to assess the threat for themselves.

This doesn't mean that there wasn't some sort of a conspiracy to increase pharmaceutics manufacturer's profits, but I do find it unlikely.

dnmr: Pandemics caused by different strains of the flu virus tend to come in several waves with each one worse than the previous. The Spanish Flu, for example, occurred in four waves with the mortality and violence of the disease becoming so severe in the later waves that physicians at the time didn't believe that the flu could cause such horrible symptoms.

The first two waves of the Spanish Flu were separated by only a few weeks while the last two were separated by years. Thus, I would guess that what you heard is some reference about how the WHO is monitoring all reports of flu cases to ensure that we aren't on the cusp of a similar situation with either H1N1 or H5N1. If they are, they'll be waiting for several years, so there's no sense worrying about it until cases of Swine or Avian flu come back around.

[demoniac93]

Damn, it really was overrated, in my Uni, at the beginning of the year, there was some hype about the swine flu, with 17-20 students reported sick, and therefore absent, so people got somewhat scared and a few days later I saw about 10 people wearing those tissue mask things...Thought it was paranoid, but that's not the point.
It never had that much attention where I live because most people were aware that it's not all that deadly, the normal flu IS in fact deadlier, the people knew which sources to trust for their information, and it turned out good.

[Centurion]

I knew it in the first place it was bulls**t. I'm not vaccinated...


At first you had to pay for the vaccine some amount of money ( I don't know exactly how much because it was different in every country), when when people realised that there's no need to panic and swine flu is just bulls**t, nobody wanted to buy it - SO they started giving it away for free.

LIKE WTF?
It's obvious that swine flu outbreak was exaggerated by the companies that produced the vaccine. All they want is money, money, money and once again money.

[Antipathy]

The Swine Flu was a pandemic: any infectious disease that affects a wide area (a continent, the world) is a pandemic. And there were reported deaths due to this flu worldwide.

I never implied the swine flu wasn't a pandemic. However, in my opinion, if all diseases that are carried around the world are considered pandemic - doesn't that make nearly every disease capable of being a pandemic? A disease doesn't even have to be dangerous to be considered a pandemic - is the word itself merely a scare word?

This aside, thoughts that something like this must be man made are pretty laughable.  Mother nature can cook up stuff that's orders of magnitude worse than this.  She already has, in fact.

And what is that? Sure, mother nature can cook up nasty stuff, but it can't act like a scientist that cuts the DNA of several viruses into pieces and makes a better, faster and stronger one out of them. It'd take a very long time for viral genetic recombination to create something like that. A few months for humans.

[Dascoo]

HEY GUYS MAYBE THE GOVERNMENT EFFECTIVELY PREVENTED A PANDEMIC FROM HAPPENING BY SPREADING FEAR THROUGH THE MEDIA

THANK YOU GOVERNMENT

[VijchtiDoodah]

...if all diseases that are carried around the world are considered pandemic - doesn't that make nearly every disease capable of being a pandemic? A disease doesn't even have to be dangerous to be considered a pandemic - is the word itself merely a scare word?

Any disease can be a pandemic. Not all diseases are capable of it, though: significant proportions of the population must have no immunity to the disease or it will never get far.

The word isn't a scare word any more than "tornado" or "drought" are scare words. It's a simple functional definition. How the populace, government, and media use the word, however, either through ignorance or deliberate manipulation, determines whether it will scare the shit out of people.

Sure, mother nature can cook up nasty stuff, but it can't act like a scientist that cuts the DNA of several viruses into pieces and makes a better, faster and stronger one out of them. It'd take a very long time for viral genetic recombination to create something like that. A few months for humans.

The flu virus does this naturally through a process called reassortment. When a host is infected with multiple strains of the flu virus, those virus particles are able to swap genetic material and build a new, unique version of the virus. This causes such a marked difference (compared to typical seasonal variation, which is usually from mutations of individual flu strains) that people rarely have any immunity to the new virus, causing a pandemic.

Any time there is a flu pandemic of significant magnitude, it's almost certainly from reassortment.

[Antipathy]

Any disease can be a pandemic.

...how the populace, government, and media use the word, however, either through ignorance or deliberate manipulation, determines whether it will scare the s**t out of people.

Exactly!

The flu virus does this naturally through a process called reassortment.

Yes, I mentioned it in my post. I don't think I explained my point very well - what I was trying to say that even when nature favors those who are the fittest, and makes them more fit through natural selection - it's hard for two viruses specialized for different animals to merge into a single one (even when the change would be favorable) - exponentially harder for several viruses. The more complicated a DNA is, the more probable it is that the virus was created by hand.

Man, I just can't get my point across without it sounding like a pile of made up junk science. So have this article, maybe it does it better. Didn't read it myself, so it might be crappy. In fact, it might contain even more made up junk science than my argument, so take it with a grain of salt...

http://politicolnews.com/genetically-engineered-n1-h1-pandemic/