SARS was under Bush and most prevalent in China, rather than Mexico.

This is the Obama Administration you are speaking of, however. Any disaster that can happen, will happen or be made to happen for the benefit of the few at the top.

This is not a result of paranoia. This is pure intuition. The trend of the times are progressing more and more to an ultimate climax. Why not disease as well?

Nah. Why worry? I’ll just wait for Obama and the Democrats to take care of me. They take care of everything, so I don’t have to.

Doh, I forgot! I’m an individualist, not a Statist. I take care of myself!

I’d like to suggest, since you are in Texas, that you consider buying a surgical mask before they disappear off the shelves. Not all together a bad idea being prepared in advance of this warning. We all know that we can’t ‘shoot’ at a virus to defend ourselves.

Not the most stylish headgear to wear but certainly more attractive than the gas mask, I was issued while living in Israel. Looking like Darth Vader was not my vision of fem fatale

Shoot, I honor your decision to respond to this in any manner you choose!

If more and more cases pop up in Texas, especially toward my area, Dallas, I’m probably making a trip to the grocery store to stock up, so I wouldn’t have to head to the grocery store a few weeks later in the middle of a bunch of coughing, sneezing people.

Even if it’s not deadly, I wouldn’t look forward to being extremely sick.

My sister raised the conspiracy angle in an email to me this morning. What if Al Qaeda released it, knowing it wasn’t really all that deadly… but their goal is economic war on the West. One effect of a pandemic – even if not deadly – would be to practically shut down most airline travel. As we saw after 9-11, the economic effects of an international airline shutdown would certainly hurt.

People avoiding the workplace, avoiding all public gatherings, would have an effect too.

Al Qaeda wouldn’t be bothered. It’s not as though Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri jet from country to country to their meetings.

I don’t feel anymore at ease.

I have emailed friends of mine who are traveling in the new few weeks to buy masks before they leave the country.

My brother and sister-in-law are both teachers (NYC and N. Jersey).

Finally, my (late) grandmother lost all (4) of her brothers to the 1918 Spanish pandemic. She became the only surviving child, which puts logic in the closet for me in the meantime.

- A ‘pandemic’ doesn’t mean the flu is deadly; it simply means it is widespread and cannot be contained. Even if no one dies, a flu can still be pandemic. So the word ‘pandemic’ itself should not cause any fear nor panic.

- Four states in Mexico have cases. California, Texas, Kansas, New York, and probably Minnesota have cases. There are cases in one province in Canada (Ontario, I think). This is likely to already be pandemic. The Canada and Kansas cases are confirmed travellers returning from Mexico. In the New York cases, all students from the same school and their families, some infected students returned from Mexico.

- The deadliest flus do not kill from secondary infections. They kill because the immune system overreacts. The immune system itself is what causes the deaths from the deadliest flus – usually by attacking the lungs. This is why the deadliest flus kill healthy adults rather than the very young and the infirm very old, because healthy adults have the strongest immune systems and therefore provoke the deadliest immune response.

- Swine flu RARELY – almost never – is transmitted human to human. This flu definitely is human-human, and seems quite infectious. What is odd is that it is deadly in Mexico, but NOT deadly anywhere else, at least so far. What’s the deal in Mexico? Are they being hit with two simultaneous flu viruses? Few of our cases even required hospitalization, so why are they dying in Mexico?

- 70 dead out of 1000 in Mexico, which would be a death rate of 7%. (But don’t trust their numbers! The 1000 infections is probably far higher – if it is 10,000 then the 7% becomes 0.7%.) The 1918-1920 Spanish flu epidemic had a death rate of 4%, I believe. This flu and the 1918 Spanish flu began in late March or very early April, which is very late in the flu season.

Mexico’s not a modern country. In the USA and Canada, no one has been in life-threatening danger yet. So I’m not too concerned. It does bear watching, though.

Laer’s link, at this time, does appear to be a great place to get the latest (and mostly reliable) news. I agree that the usual news sources are reporting very slowly. Laer’s twitter link:

http://twitter.com/BreakingNews

Not to poo-poo Matt, but are these the next bird flu or SARS epidemic? As much as I read Drudge, much of what he writes needs many grains of salt. I’m starting to question the man on his news priortities.