What Socialized Medicine Gets You

This post could also be titled, "And They'll Wonder Why Swine Flu Became Tamiflu Resistant." What follows is a message board post by a wedding photographer in a Flickr Group (I've highlighted a few things):

We were due to shoot a wedding this Saturday for a lovely couple who's cousin's wedding we shot last year. Unfortunately the last few days I have been starting (and continuing!) to feel ill with cold symptoms.

Because swine flu is so all over the place now in the UK, doctors are no longer actually seeing/testing patients, you go online or phone a helpine, answer some questions on symptoms and if you r symptoms match up to those for swine flu, you phone a dr and they arrange for you to get some tamiflu.

In short, I could have a cold, or bad hayfever (although I know it's not hayfever as antihistamines haven't worked), but I have cancelled the wedding as I don't want to risk infecting a whole wedding group with swine flu especially as there will be children there. Luckily for me, I have a friend who is a local photographer who is very good, and he is miraculously free and will be shooting for me.

The thing is though, with the rubbish non diagnosis we're having over here, what if this is only a summer cold and in two weeks time I actually DO get swine flu and have no option but to take it to a wedding?

There you have it. In order to "remove unnecessary costs" from the system, you may not even get to see a doctor or receive tests many would deem "necessary." And the worst part is even if Obamacare ultimately dies the death it deserves to die, this will likely still negatively affect us as this willy-nilly approach to Swine Flu diagnosis in countries with socialized medicine will greatly increase the likelihood of a Swine Flu that is resistant to medications that normally could reduce the virus's severity.

Reuters Panic Mongering on H1N1 Swine Flu

I was originally going to blame WHO for panic mongering, but I actually think Reuters is to blame.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday that the H1N1 flu pandemic was the fastest-moving pandemic ever and that it was now pointless to count every case.

The United Nations agency, which declared an influenza pandemic on June 11, revised its requirements so that national health authorities need only report clusters of severe cases or deaths caused by the new virus or unusual clinical patterns.

Normal flus can move too fast to count, too. The difference is a lot of people never report or go to the doctor. This ancestor of the Spanish flu is worth keeping an eye on, don't get me wrong, but we've seen nothing from it to this point that makes it panic worthy.

The H1N1 Solution

Okay, so the CDC says that the H1N1 swine flu isn't going away. Yet we also know that, as currently constituted, it is virulent but not a particularly deadly flu. So I say we pucker up and take our medicine, chicken pox style. Everyone who doesn't have it right now has to go to a birthday party for someone who does have it. Spin the bottle will be encouraged. This way, the 299 million Americans who haven't gotten it will come down with it and build up immunities before the virus starts to change itself. Also, we'll save billions on vaccinations. Kiss a Swine Flu victim today!

Pandemic Thought

We are currently in a situation where we have a flu virus that is rapidly spreading through the population and we have no clue what so ever about how serious the illness is. Is it a very deadly strain, as the initial Mexico evidence would indicate, or is that Mexican evidence somehow bad, giving us a skewed view of the lethality of this virus? Either way, we don't know, so shouldn't we be looking at taking some common sense precautions like shutting down sporting events and closing schools en masse while we figure it out? Because once we figure it out, it is going to be too late to do anything.

Or are we already past the point where any of that matters?