UPDATE: this post was made before 1000 people here were diagnosed.
Get yourselves over to my Melbourne pal Health Trip where there is a link to
Medical Journal of Australia’s online report this week
”Swine flu update: bringing home the bacon”,
several characteristics of this virus have been observed:
- on average there is an incubation period of 3-4 days between exposure to the virus and onset of symptoms
- in the US over a third of cases have diarrhoea and vomiting along with the usual symptoms such as a sore throat and malaise
* * * * * * *
The whole thing is a gift for the eedjit meeja.
We all say we have 'flu, when really we only have a Swine-of-a-cold.
All Influenza strains can kill infants and the elderly ALL the time fer chrissakes.
AND our eedjit govt could have kept this particular strain of H1N1 flu out of the country by giving masks to all new arrivals and instructing them to wear for a week. That simple, and god knows they had all the warning time in the world.
We can only hope that the whole thing will bring about something I have wanted for years -
1. an increased understanding that sneezing and coughing really, really spreads your germs onto other people who then get sick in turn; and
2. a pissy little scrunched up paper tissue is NO USE in public - you must carry proper handkerchiefs for coughing on buses.
I brought this image from a UK blogger who wrote a great post on Dirty Dancing which is worth a click-through.
Your homework on this topic is to find and view Panic In The Streets: a great old
B-movie with Richard Widmark saving New Orleans from a pneumonic plague.
