perspective people...perspective.

In the past year, the dread H1N1 virus (a/k/a Swine or Hamthrax) has stirred up the dread of "pandemia". Well, if it's a pandemia, it's a pretty pussy one. The last 300 days have given us a grand total of 5850 H1N1 deaths...globally. That's 100 a week, worldwide.

Nooooo, swine flu pandemia!!!

I think at this point we all need to chill out about the swine. For instance, Dengue Fever -another human infectious/communicable disease, has already killed three times as many people. Sound exotic does it? Well exotic only to the extent that:

Each serotype is sufficiently different that there is no cross-protection and epidemics caused by multiple serotypes (hyperendemicity) can occur. Dengue is transmitted to humans by the Aedes aegypti or more rarely the Aedes albopictus mosquito, which feed during the day.^[5] The WHO says some 2.5 billion people, two fifths of the world's population, are now at risk from dengue and estimates that there may be 50 million cases of dengue infection worldwide every year. The disease is now endemic in more than 100 countries

That's right. 40% of the world is at risk of contracting an imminently fatal disease that offers no cross protection from previous exposure and is already indemic to 100 nations. So, take your NyQuil, drink fluids, don't fucking panic, and realize that this ain't the Spanish flu people. It's wussy version of the plain old flu, and those suckers killed 3,500,000 people last year alone. Of those, only 5800 were swine-related (in other words, regular ole flu got 604 people for every person that died of swine).

Seriously, would you rather get the swine or stumble upon even chilled-out polar bears?

I win.