Warp wrote:
>   Regular seasonal flu kills about 250000 - 500000 people every year
> (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/2003/fs211/en/). Swine flu has
> killed so far less than 7000 people.
> 
>   Exactly what is it that makes the swine flu so special as to cause a
> worldwide panic?
> 
>   (If I have understood correctly, the difference between the swine flu,
> and the H1N1 strands in general, compared to other more common influenzas
> is that it can kill healthy young people more easily. But look at the
> numbers. Is a healthy young person worth 100 sick and old peeople?)
> 

The fact that it *has* reached epidemic proportions at least once, and 
killed 10 times what normal flu has maybe? " An influenza virus called 
influenza type A subtype H1N1 is now known to have been the cause of the 
extreme mortality of this pandemic, which resulted in an estimated 25 
million deaths, though some researchers have projected that it caused as 

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/287805/influenza-pandemic-of-1918-19

The fact is that its notable in carrying much deadlier payloads, 
sometimes, due to it trading off to another species as part of its life 
cycle (Swine can be infected by both human and avian flu, so its at 
least "possible" you could get a dangerous normal flu, and have it 
"borrow" DNA, in a cell infected by both, from the avian flu that hit 
Asia recently. We may not be "which" one has the payload, but the cost 
of getting it wrong would be far worse than with the normal flu. The 
problem here seems to be that the current strain may be a dud. The 
problem with all the idiots whining about vaccinations, and people 
getting sick from having them, etc. is that..

Well, lets say this was an unexploded 5,000 lb bomb. Taking the vaccine 
is the equivalent of hiding all the hammers from the neighbor kids, and 
what ever else you can think of, so that the morons that don't get what 
"bomb" means won't go hammering at it, to see what happens, before 
experts show up to take care of the problem (or the virus passes back 
out of the population). If you are lucky, the mechanism in it is broken, 
not just stuck, and they can hammer on it for days without it going off. 
If you are not so lucky, the first idiot with a rock turns the 
neighborhood into a crater.

Which, given such a clear possibility, would you pick?

Then imagine that this is some city some place where people "collect" 
hollowed out, and non-functional bombs, most of them small, so when one 
turns out to not be, it only blows up the moron that collected it. An 
army truck rolls through with a 5,000lb bomb, which tumbles off the 
truck, without the driver noticing. What would the reaction to an entire 
town full of people like that be? Probably - "Ah, it can't be a live 
one, we got hundreds of the damn things as lawn decorations, so this one 
has got to be empty, or why wouldn't it have been tied down better?" The 
local, "Maybe you should let me look at it first.", expert tells 
everyone, "Lets just be safe and keep clear of it until we are sure." I 
am betting you would get the same reaction you get to the morons who 
think H1N1 isn't more dangerous than the normal flu. What they don't 
bloody get is that ***if they are wrong this time*** their insistence 
that its all unnecessary could be wrong on a scale that would send half 
the religion fanatics on the planet staking out barns all over the 
planet, in case it was the one Jesus reappeared in. I.e., plague level 
infection and death rates.

You are looking at it wrong. Its not, "Are a few healthy young people 
worth 100 sick people.", its, "Are 100 sick people worth 500,000,000 
dead people?", which is the possible outcome if one of these things gets 
a particularly nasty mix of genes, from mixing some seriously nasty 
avian flu, with, say, an already high death rate "human" flu, before it 
starts spreading.

Unfortunately, we can't know, until "after" people start dying, how bad 
any given flu will be, and so we hedge our bets, by trying to make sure 
as few people die, instead of just being miserable, as possible. If we 
do it right, we *never* know how bad it would have been without it. If 
we do it wrong, and guess *very* wrong, you better be locked in a 
basement for 5-6 months, with your own food supply, because you don't 
want to "catch" the result.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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