Mar 16
The Common Flu – Not so Common at All!
The rash of flu outbreaks that has been the topic of warnings by scientists ad other health workers for some time has become more of a truth with the developments that are now sweeping the world in terms of pandemic proportions. The scourge the bird-flu is exacting on the population of this earth continues to ravage people’s lives then in comes the new Swine flu epidemic that has seemingly met forecasts/predictions in the speed at which it started to spread all over the world in the span of a few months. It started with a boy who got sick from a small Mexican town, seemingly form a rare form of flu that was unknowingly obtained from pigs that in poor countries shared close proximity in terms of living spaces to their owners. He gets sick, taken to the local clinic and then infects everybody there spreading the disease to the capital of Mexico then to the whole world.
The “Zero patient” recovered and is now living well, yet the thousands that have been infected with the new variant of the flu virus are either dying or seriously ill catching the health care industry by surprise with no available vaccines available to protect the rest of the population of even the biggest and richest countries on earth. Almost all the continents have reported cases of the new swine flu and the number of infections are growing by the day. Deaths are also on the rise, but mostly in elderly victims and young children whose immune system has little angst to fight the virus that causes the severe flu reaction. The movies were right, and the flu spread like wildfire, even before they health industry got the chance to identify the culprit. Spread all over the world in a matter of hours from ground zero, thanks to modern travel the WHO has declared that time for containment is useless for it has already spread to most corners of the world and focus should be on the treatment and development of a vaccine that would help uninfected people to fight off the effects of the new virus. The US is under way to develop proper vaccines, yet even they admit it would be a few months before they have enough to protect all Americans on the mainland longer for those all over the world. And what about the poor countries who don;t have the sophisticated equipment and big budgets as the US CDC, how will they fare? More on the developing pandemic in the coming posts, observe proper hand washing for it seems to be still the best way to protect against the virus that is currently sweeping our bodies as we suffer from its effects, our immune systems barely able to defend itself against this new scourge.