Comments on: Swine Flu: How scared should we be?

By: oyun indir

oyun indir — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:51:33 +0000

Oh, and I yell at the TV every time they discuss the (outbreak) numbers.

By: bledsoe

bledsoe — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:06:10 +0000

I've come to think that perspective is not something to expect in abundance from the mainstream media. When your primary concern is getting as many viewers/readers/listeners as possible, you're gonna tend to go for things that are dramatic and/or fear-inducing, and the possibility of a world-wide infectious disease outbreak has got that in spades. Discussions of the likelihood of such an outbreak, however, are much less dramatic.

Good luck with the trip planning! Hope everything works out well.

By: Jennifer Davis

Jennifer Davis — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:41:07 +0000

My family has been following this closely because we are trying to plan a family trip and the plan had been for Cancun. One limb of the family tree has become VERY against going to Mexico since the outbreak of the swine flu. Our limb was worried when there were travel advisories stating a recommendation not to visit Mexico. That recommendation is no longer there, and I recently found out that WHO held a conference in Cancun.
I'm ready to make reservations and get with the plan.

Oh, and I yell at the TV every time they discuss the (outbreak) numbers. The least the media could do is to also state the number of regular flu victims to give some perspective.
.-= Jennifer Davis´s last blog ..I wanted to scream =-.

By: browse

browse — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:59:00 +0000

Re: I just find it interesting (and troubling) ...

Agreed, squared and cubed. That sort of behavior is pretty deeply wired in our monkey minds. Shiny new data catches our attention (Look, a new new flu strain!) while long-term known issues (Heart disease, yawn) gets lost in the background noise, despite the relative dangers posed by the latter versus the former.

By: bledsoe

bledsoe — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:29:39 +0000

A fair point. And the possibility of another worldwide flu pandemic in the next few years is very real, and could potentially kill a lot of people, and I'm glad the WHO and other health orgs have been preparing for that possibility for a while. And I'm glad they're monitoring this particular influenza outbreak as well. I just find it interesting (and troubling) that people don't generally get too concerned about boring, everyday threats to our health or lives, like car wrecks or heart disease. Or if we do, we don't do the simple things that we could do to protect ourselves, like not driving so fast or eating a healthy diet and exercising. Those things are just so boring. But the swine flu, man, we love seeing the reports about that and talking about whether we think we might have it or whether we should get one of those masks. It's like a national social event that we can all follow and talk about on Facebook.

By: browse

browse — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:31:17 +0000

I hear what you're saying, but I'm going to disagree with your conclusion.

Yes, if you look at the number of people currently plagued (heh) by Swine Flu, it is a trivial worry compared to the number of children crushed by falling vending machines, shark attacks and running with scissors.

The gotcha is, we don't expect the rate of incidence of those latter three examples to change much, year after year. Whereas with an infectious disease, we do worry about a sharp (exponential) growth rate. For each person infected, they have an opportunity to infect N people, each of who can infect another N people, so on and so on.

So, the current number of infections, not at all scary. Where that curve might lead... potentially much more scary.