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Influenza Epidemic, affects parks and fairs.


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^ A zombie virus would certainly be interesting. Anyway, quite a few people I've spoken to are really quite scared of the disease that's caused a confirmed 9 deaths overall. Here's the good news.

 

"Despite the scale of the alert, the WHO stated on April 29 that the majority of people infected with the virus have made a full recovery without need of medical attention or antiviral drugs."

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I have been working with Schlitterbahn Kansas City on a project over the past couple of days, and while searching for a little bit of current news and some background information about the company overall, I did find this:

 

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/30/0430flubiz.html

 

I know I have been joking around, and throwing around some of my personal views, but I thought I would post something serious and relevant to the industry.

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Amazing to think swine flu only trails the regular flu by about 35,999 deaths in the US. The school where my fiancee works was missing around 25% of kids and had industrial sized bottles of hand sanitizer everywhere. People walk away from me because I get a cough each allergy season. Simply amazing what 24/7 news can do on a slow news week.

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http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-sci-swine-reality30-2009apr30,0,3606923.story

 

Scientists see this flu strain as relatively mild

 

Genetic data indicate this outbreak won't be as deadly as that of 1918, or even the average winter.

 

As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

 

In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.

 

"Let's not lose track of the fact that the normal seasonal influenza is a huge public health problem that kills tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands around the world," said Dr. Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine in Madison.

 

His remarks Wednesday came the same day Texas authorities announced that a nearly 2-year-old boy with the virus had died in a Houston hospital Monday.

 

"Any time someone dies, it's heartbreaking for their families and friends," Olsen said. "But we do need to keep this in perspective."

 

Flu viruses are known to be notoriously unpredictable, and this strain could mutate at any point -- becoming either more benign or dangerously severe. But mounting preliminary evidence from genetics labs, epidemiology models and simple mathematics suggests that the worst-case scenarios are likely to be avoided in the current outbreak.

 

"This virus doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to kill like the 1918 virus," which claimed an estimated 50 million victims worldwide, said Richard Webby, a leading influenza virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

 

When the current virus was first identified, the similarities between it and the 1918 flu seemed ominous.

 

Both arose in the spring at the tail end of the flu season. Both seemed to strike people who were young and healthy instead of the elderly and infants. Both were H1N1 strains, so called because they had the same types of two key proteins that are largely responsible for a virus' ability to infect and spread.

 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health published genetic sequence data Monday morning of flu samples isolated from patients in California and Texas, and thousands of scientists immediately began downloading the information. Comparisons to known killers -- such as the 1918 strain and the highly lethal H5N1 avian virus -- have since provided welcome news.

 

"There are certain characteristics, molecular signatures, which this virus lacks," said Peter Palese, a microbiologist and influenza expert at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. In particular, the swine flu lacks an amino acid that appears to increase the number of virus particles in the lungs and make the disease more deadly.

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It doesn't help when I turn on the news and they're reporting that someone on Obama's team has swine flu symptoms and a ticker that says "President Obama is healthy."

 

Blah blah blah....Someone has a cough and runny nose...maybe a fever.

 

Sure, people die from fevers in countries like Mexico...but not the grand ol' U.S. of A!

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The news just went from swine flu to child welfare officials questioning Octomom about one of her billion kids' black eye.

 

...really.

 

Oh! And coming up next...find out what Lady Gaga's real name is!

 

I wish I was making these up. [/serious]

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The news just went from swine flu to child welfare officials questioning Octomom about one of her billion kids' black eye.

 

...really.

 

Oh! And coming up next...find out what Lady Gaga's real name is!

 

I wish I was making these up. [/serious]

 

Must be a slow news day, lol.

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They closed my alma mater today and tomorrow because one person got the flu. It has not been positively identified as Swine flu...but they are not taking any precautions.

 

It's a rural school in Western NY where the closest town literally consists of about 200 people. We could be at serious risk because I bet there are a lot of farmers and one of them could have recently adopted new piglets from Mexico.

 

I'll bet that's how that student caught it....yep.

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This epidemic reminds me of the Staff or Staph (however you spell it lol) epidemic we had last year. Everyone was running around panicing, thinking that they will catch the disease and about a month after they started talking about it, everything was back to normal event though staph is still out there. I know I spelled it wrong, somebody please correct it.

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