Jezebel 
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New York, 3:15 AM
Sat Nov 28
29 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/14/09
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10/14/09
Yesterday was a terrible day in my tiny town. A boy who's been hospitalized for about a month with H1N1/resultant pneumonia at a major children's hospital here in TX lost his fight after the family had to make the choice to take him off of life support.
His name was Michael Soliz, and he was in the eighth grade. To say there was "nothing more that could be done" is just heartbreaking beyond words.
(My 7th grade daughter said that brought the total # of kids in her jr high to 63, just for an idea of how bizarre it should be that in this tiny town I have this terrible, terrible story to tell.)
10/14/09
Also, two more kids in our teensy-tiny town were in school Monday, hospitalized today.
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10/14/09
That could be because I believe the US is taking a more cautious approach to those adjuvants than other countries, and has ordered more doses of the non-adjuvanted version, so this may be less of an issue for his primarily US audience, and more of a concern for those of us north of the border.
Either way, he was debating the issue with a practicing transplant surgeon, when really a public health expert, an infectious disease researcher, or even a well informed family doc would have been a better person to actually engage on the topic, they could have addressed his concerns in a much better way, and hopefully gotten some solid information to his audience. Instead, the poor guy was clearly sitting there thinking "this isn't in my talking points. I'm here to discuss health care reform. I didn't do any prep on this. crap."
10/14/09
In all seriousness, though, I don't think Bill Maher is necessarily interested in getting "solid information" to his viewers—esp. not when it comes to Western medicine.
I wonder if Mr. Maher would be ballsy enough to trot out that anti-vaccine shit to, I dunno, the CDC director or someone like that. I'd love to see it if he did.
10/14/09
10/14/09
One more thing: Is there room for me in your country? :)
10/14/09
Still, the fact that Maher had a Republican that was allowing his profession and sense of moral responsibility to triumph over his party's talking points and standing up for health care reform... and he went off about vaccines? Oh Bill....
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04/29/09
In 2007 when there was a lot of panic over avian flu, millions of birds were killed in Asian because there was a worry that the family farming tendency to live with your chickens could spread disease to humans. Breathing in the respiratory secretions of an infected bird or pig can infect you.
Yes, contaminated water could be part of the disease path, but small farming comes with its own set of risks.
04/29/09
In college I took a course about the psychology of inhumanity and the holocaust, and we learned that in times of difficult change (i.e. serious economic downturns) populations have a hard time adjusting and end up scapegoating--and killing--a minority population. There's so much hatred here in the US toward Mexicans and Latinos in general, I've wondered for a long time what would happen if things in this country got really bad, and with the economy, and now this "Mexican flu" on top of it...it may become very dangerous to be a Mexican or Hispanic in this country.
We need to not let that happen.
04/29/09
Maybe following news outlets was not a smart idea.
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Of course I haven't seen that reported here, because why ruin a good panic-inducing story with facts and common sense and more information?
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[imgur.com]
04/29/09
(Also, it is totally divine punishment for allowing that abortion-monger Obama to speak at our commencement. I'm taking bets as to how long it will be before the right-wing crazies in and around Notre Dame say this in public.)
04/29/09
I am waiting for them to just CLOSE THE BORDER IN A PANIC! Which could grind the city to a halt. Ugh.
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[pandagon.net]
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04/29/09
(I'm not a doctor or a health professional, but I like clear information for laypeople, and the blogger, Jim MacDonald, is pretty good at this.)
From the article:
"Now, your influenza virus is a simple one. It doesn't even have DNA in it. It has strands of RNA in its center. RNA mutates pretty fast. But here's the really tricky part about the flu: it has a sneaky way of getting past the immune system, even if you've had the flu before. The shell or capsule that surrounds that RNA is made of two proteins, hemagglutinin and neuramidinase. Hemagglutinin and neuramidinase can move like the tiles in a sliding-block puzzle, presenting different protein shapes to your antibodies. Hemagglutinin and neuramidinase are the H and N that you see when people talk about Influenza H5N1 or H1N1 or H3N2 or what-may-have-you. There are fifteen known types of hemagglutinin and nine known types of neuramidinase, and they have subtypes below that. Those two substances keep moving around, so that antibodies don't recognize them. This is called 'antigen drift.'"
Like I said, I'm not in the health care industry at all, but I find this stuff interesting and I like pointing it out to other folks who might find it interesting (that and I sort of secretly love Jim Macdonald.)
Here's more information from the CDC website:
Is the H1N1 swine flu virus the same as human H1N1 viruses?
No. The H1N1 swine flu viruses are antigenically very different from human H1N1 viruses and, therefore, vaccines for human seasonal flu would not provide protection from H1N1 swine flu viruses.
So no, it's unlikely that you would have some sort of immunity to this new brand of H1N1 just because you've had some other brand of flu before. It takes time for your body to cook up the right type of antibodies to kill off a novel strain. The flu virus itself isn't even really a living thing--it's some dumb RNA strands that need a host to even replicate!--but even something that's dumb as a box of hair can mutate rapidly and cause bad shit.
04/29/09