The Xpat Files
I'm American. He's Swiss. The Boys are a bit of both. Dispatches from the far side of the Röstigraben. With a little cycling on the side.
Sunday, October 09, 2005
About Me
- Name: swissmiss
- Location: Switzerland
An American in Switzerland. Getting Swisser all the time.
Previous Posts
- Should I be troubled by this?
- To the person who found my site by searching for "...
- Rejuvinated
- Indiana, I hardly knew 'ya
- Things I've been meaning to blog
- "Rule of Four" my ass!
- (Non-)impulse buying
- Starting solids
- Is your Haushaltvorrat in order?
- Sign of the times
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4 Comments:
Yes well it is the Guardian and I don't trust their science section, but when you're stocking up on tinned food and bottled water, preparing to sit out the end of the world, buy Relenza, rather than Tamiflu. HN51 is already showing up Tamiflu-resistant strauns.
Oh, and an apple a day....
Hi and welcome. Why don't you trust the Guardian's science section? Something I should know? Unfortunatley, however, that was just the first link I found and the one I decided to go with. The story is legit - it's in the IHT, NZZ, Der Bund, on the Tagesschau...
this post is slightly reassuring about Tamiflu resistance, but not about its actual usefulness in the event of a pandemic.
Swissmiss: The Guardian takes a very dim view of most science (with the exception of one issue per week, I think Monday, when it publishes a very readable science supplement).
The problem with the Pandemic That's Going To Kill Us All, is that the virus that's going to be responsible for it (hopefully) doesn't exist yet. You have to come into close contact with an infected bird to catch H5N1 - it doesn't pass from human to human like "normal" flu. It's the fear that the virus could mutate so that it can be passed from human to human that's scaring the bejeezus out of epidemiologists everywhere. That's almost certainly going to occur where humans are in close contact with infected birds. Probably chickens and probably in SE Asia.
Gosh, I'm sounding awfully preachy. Sorry.
actual - no, you don't sound preachy. I know the H5n1 virus is at the moment an *extremely* inefficient virus for human to human transmission, though I belive there have been 2 documented cases of such in Thailand. With flu season coming up, my fear is a person - enough people - contracting both flus simultaneously, allowing for exchange of enough material to allow for efficient h2h transmission of an h5n1 virus. At any rate, even though h2h transmission is basically a non-factor at this point I'll confess that this thing is scaring the crap out of me.
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