Okay, everyone. Please don't freak out about Swine Flu.

[mndwrm]

Firstly, if you live here in America (this includes you, Ohio and other Mid-Westerly people), you have medical treatment available. You have a good, clean country, with high health and food standards that we even do a decent job of upholding

Comments

[silver_rabbit]

Hear hear! I've been sick all week and everyone "jokingly" says "OHNOESITSTEHSWINEFLU!!!1" It gets old real fast. I'm pretty sure it's not swine flu, seeing as how I haven't, to my knowledge, visited Mexico lately.

I am SO glad I'm not still working at the pediatricians' office. I'm sure they're getting tons of phone calls from concerned parents wanting to know what the symptoms are. Um, maybe flu symptoms? Duh?

Oh yeah, I just finished playing Portal. Awesome game.

[dyir]

Your customers have no pattern recognition, since you are almost chronically ill! LOL If it *was* swine flu, its more likely that you are some kind of Typhoid Mary. We could call you Erinfluenza!

[mndwrm]

1. Portal rocks.

2. Erinfluenza sounds like a silver-age comic villain. Awesome.

3. They just posted a "OMG are you scared of Swine Flu" writer's block post thingy on the front page of LJ. Great.

[silver_rabbit]

If I'm a silver-age comic villain named Erinfluenza, you guys are totally the first ones I'm going to track down and cough all over.

[dyir]

Ironically, I had *just* started reading a book called "Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused it" when this whole thing got started. After reading just how horrifyingly lethal and fast spreading that disease was (second only to the Black Death!! It boggles my mind that we don't learn about this in school AT ALL) and then listening to the news of the numbers of deaths in Mexico, all I could think was "seriously?!?" If this was the 1918 flu, we'd all be dead by now. None of this pansy-ass worrying and muttering about what we are going to do: it would have been a global issue within days, not months.

So having just finished the book, I've just adopted the attitude of shake my head and ignore the media for the moment. Virtually no one currently alive has any real concept of what a real global pandemic looks like anymore.

[mndwrm]

I concur. Hopefully it doesn't come to this, but I would start being concerned when the global death toll reaches the millions, or more locally in the thousands.

Alternatively, if a single one of these people reanimate and start snorting out "Oink-oink" (which, everyone knows, is porcine for "Brains), this would be a cause of concern.

[dyir]

I can see it now: shambling corpses hoarsely crying "baaaaaaacon" endlessly.

[deledrius]

Do you think it's too late to become Patient Zero? Cause that's a cool name and I'd like to have it.

[dyir]

Sure you can! Just kill everyone with the disease and take their stuff...er, virus. Whatever.

[mndwrm]

...or, contract a horribly virulent strain of the virus, and make a traceable path of diseased destruction through the US; this would be even better if you were only a carrier, and people could expect and fear your arrival. First or not, you can guarantee you'll be labeled "Patient Zero."

[deledrius]

Help me engineer this. Where do we start?