This little piggy has the flu

I've had a lot of people ask me about the swine flu. What is it? What does it do? Hopefully some of those people will read this so I don't have to keep repeating it.

Swine flu is a strain of flu that pigs managed to pick up, it has since mutated (as all viruses do) and transferred to humans. Is it more dangerous than regular flu? Not really. Flu is generally dangerous to the young, old and immune-system impaired.

So why the big hullabaloo? Who knows. I really think that the media has nothing else to report on. There was a similar outbreak in 1976 that was also sensationalized by the media. This led to mass hysteria and a huge push by the government to give out vaccines to everyone. Well, it turns out these vaccines caused more deaths and permanent side-effects than the swine flu.

Regular flu killed 36,000 Americans last year. Swine flu has about 120 confirmed cases in the US and 1 death, who was actually a boy from Mexico that was "visiting" the U.S. So in a country with a population of 300 million people, you have about a .0000004% chance of coming into contact with a carrier. Let's round it up and say .000001% which would be a couple thousand carriers instead of a couple hundred.

The media will run with this and the government will probably throw a couple billion tax-payer dollars at it, but all-in-all it probably won't amount to anything. I predict that the deaths caused by this flu will be substantially lower than regular flu.

If your still worried, just use good hygiene. Wash your hands. Don't eat food off the side-walk. You know the drill.