Move over Bird Flu, here comes Swine Flu. As if it were written by disaster movie writers in Hollywood, I woke up this morning with a new thing to fear in life. A few years back there was a panic over bird flu, and there was even a movie called "Bird Flu Disaster" at one point. The media flooded our homes with any instance of a death related, or closely related to bird flu and the world was in a panic.
Then the news about that dwindled and we moved onto food poison and random scrutiny over peanut allergies and things that seem to not have existed in my neighborhood growing up. They seemed to prevail in higher class neighborhoods, but that's neither here nor there.
The new nightmare that is growing, as of the 24th is Swine Flu. The World Health Organization (Oddly enough called WHO) stated that an outbreak of swing flu in the United States might be the end of the world! I mean, if Bird Flu was as bad as they said it was, and if African Bees were going to mop us up, surely 800 cases of Swine Flu and 60 deaths is cause enough for you to panic, right?
At first, I thought that this was just a very isolated incident. I mean, how many times did Bird Flu hit the West and take out thousands of people? Better yet, how many times have we heard of medical scares? I know in my city, there was a Measles scare, because more and more people are scared of getting vaccinated. However, this might be more than an isolated incident. This morning alone there are reports that people in 2 states have Swine Flu now, and some say 11 cases, others say 2, and you start to piece together the panic inducing media trying to pull together a way to cleverly convince you that you could be next!
So before you finish off your Pig Ear Tacos, or your Snout Burritos (my favorite) maybe you too should be concerned. I mean, there have been a dozen cases since 2005 and all of them were in farm workers with direct contact to pigs. This of course has one Country to blame, and that's what really ties up this story. The finger is squarely pointed at Mexico. So not only must we blame Mexico for our East Coast teens overdosing, we must now blame them for Swine Flu, at least that's the first Country to blame in all these news stories. I mean, surely the U.S doesn't have any questionable methods in raising, farming and slaughtering pigs.
Src - Reuters, The New York Times, AFP, CIDRAP, TNMT, Sarcasm
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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
"Swine influenza viruses are not transmitted by food. You can not get swine influenza from eating pork or pork products. Eating properly handled and cooked pork and pork products is safe. Cooking pork to an internal temperature of 160°F kills the swine flu virus as it does other bacteria and viruses".
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/swine/key_facts.htm
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