H1N1 Hogwash

I haven’t blogged in a while but this “swine” flu nonsense has pushed me to write something.

We hear in the news that H1N1 is a nasty pandemic influenza, which I do not doubt, and they try to liken  it to the 1918 Spanish flu in terms of possible morality rates.  Here are some thing to consider however:

1)  This is 2009, not 1918.  They are comparing apples and oranges!  They still practiced bloodletting (to a small degree) in the early 1900’s to cure ailments like the flu for cryin’ out loud!  Proper hygiene was NOT the norm…soap wasn’t even the norm for that matter.  Most people didn’t even have hot/cold running water in their homes, much less bathe on a daily basis.  They weren’t entirely aware of how things spread.  The medical community had some, emphasis on the word SOME knowledge but nothing like today.  I mean some people  in the U.S. still had dirt floors for Pete’s sake!  So the comparison is disingenuous at best.

2)  The media, CDC, WHO, and medical community love to bring up the “nearly 40 million deaths” as a result of the 1918 Spanish flu.  That’s a huge number.  What they don’t tell you is that out of the U.S. population of approximately 106,000,000 roughly 490,000 died from the flu.  Again 490,000 is a very large number, but think of it in these terms, it was less than 5% of the entire 1918 U.S. population that perished.  When you put it that way it’s not so scary is it.  I make no light of even one person’s death, but I cannot abide the misuse of statistics.

3)  The CDC and others in the medical field wave the “its hitting the young and healthy” banner, but just because you are young and you have no underlying medical or autoimmune issues does not make one “healthy”.  Young people do not tend to eat foods that are high in vitamins and minerals that could bolster the immune system.  They tend to eat, oh say burgers and fries, pizza, bags of chips, you get my point.  Not any of those foods constitute healthy.  Let me reiterate… young ≠ “healthy”.  With 5% of U.S. children (25% in some urban areas) having hypertension and childhood obesity at appalling levels, this nation’s young are far from healthy.  We should not only harp on the hygiene issue, but the diet issue as well.  Most of us including the young are sorely deficient in many vitamins and minerals due to our diets and lifestyles.

So here’s my beef;  I started getting pamphlets in the mail from the CDC about 10 months before all this hit, about the next pandemic.  It was as though they couldn’t wait for it to get here.   Now we have one and they use deceptive reporting and stats to make you think it’s worse than it is.  Think I’m wrong?  Where are the “flu maps” that report the current number of active cases?  Google current or active H1N1 cases and you’ll just get sites that give you running tallies of cases since March 2009 with exceptions being the Northern Kentucky University’s site and the WHO that give you a tally of cases since school started in Aug 2009.   You have to seriously dig to find out what the current  active case count is.  I was able to locate a tally from the previous 2 weeks from my state’s DOH web site, but even then it’s not very definitive.  It lumps everything that is flu-like along with the flu and it makes no distinction with regards to H1N1 cases.  I’m not a conspiracy theorist but this whole thing has me wondering if the theorists are wrong.

I will never tell anyone to not get vaccinated for this illness, but I will heavily caution them.  If you lay awake at night scared to death about whether or not you are going to get the swine flu and die from it, by all means get vaccinated.  I personally choose to investigate, look at the facts or the lack of them and go from there.  I am a huge advocate of natural prevention as opposed to medical concoctions that the labs cook up.  Man made medication has its place but only in certain instances.  Be responsible for your own health, eat better, take multivitamins and supplements.  In todays fast paced, “I can’t be bothered with it” and “let someone else do the research for me because I haven’t got the time” age we live in, I think it’s time for us to stop being “sheeple” and blindly going along with herd.  You simply cannot trust everything that you see or hear on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, or Fox as they are simply parroting reports they’ve received.  Don’t accept everything that the news tries to spoon feed you.  Research things for yourself.  Do a little digging, you just might learn something.