tetano
Editor, Senior Moderator
10/02/2011 @ 10:16PM
by Steven Salzberg.
Remember the flu pandemic? The one that swept the world just two years ago? You might be forgiven if this has slipped your mind – after all, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal now. That’s because we got lucky: despite many dire warnings about the danger of another 1918 “Spanish flu”, when the 2009 pandemic arrived, it was far milder than previous pandemics. Hundreds of millions of people got the flu in 2009, but for most of them, it wasn’t so bad. In fact, the new flu is less severe the old flu – the strain that was circulating before the new pandemic hit.
snip
Er, no. Not exactly. For one thing, surveillance in pigs appears to be nonexistent. I checked to see how many flu sequences from pigs in Mexican have been desposited in the public archive at GenBank since 2009 (using this terrific database). The result? One, in 2009. Nothing from 2010 or 2011. Hello, is anyone awake at the CDC and the WHO?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevens...-government-hiding-something-about-swine-flu/
by Steven Salzberg.
Remember the flu pandemic? The one that swept the world just two years ago? You might be forgiven if this has slipped your mind – after all, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal now. That’s because we got lucky: despite many dire warnings about the danger of another 1918 “Spanish flu”, when the 2009 pandemic arrived, it was far milder than previous pandemics. Hundreds of millions of people got the flu in 2009, but for most of them, it wasn’t so bad. In fact, the new flu is less severe the old flu – the strain that was circulating before the new pandemic hit.
snip
Er, no. Not exactly. For one thing, surveillance in pigs appears to be nonexistent. I checked to see how many flu sequences from pigs in Mexican have been desposited in the public archive at GenBank since 2009 (using this terrific database). The result? One, in 2009. Nothing from 2010 or 2011. Hello, is anyone awake at the CDC and the WHO?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevens...-government-hiding-something-about-swine-flu/
Last edited by a moderator:
