Flu Pandemic? I Doubt it...

If the gov't says it, it's likely false.

From GreaterThings.com:

Bird flu poses no great threat to humanity. This disease is simply too lethal to its victims and too fast in killing them to ever pose any significant threat to mankind. With a 50% or so mortality rate occurring in about 5 to 7 days after infection this disease cannot live long enough to spread. It also assures prompt detection. Quick effective countermeasures can be applied. It may be a problem, but H5N1, as this virus is known, is not going to be a mass killer.

Good point; I hadn't thought of that...

As Americans roll up their sleeves each year for flu shots and our pharmacies stock up on remedies, the bill for the flu is very high. We spend billions on this. Shockingly these methods are almost worthless.

Flu vaccines being the most effective technical control for the flu are hit and miss at best. Often the flu vaccine provided has no effect on the strain that arrives. Even when it is effective, it only works for about 70% of the people who get it. The mutational behavior of the flu makes vaccine a questionable strategy at best.

While Tamiflu, Amantadine and other drugs may be effective against the flu, they require application almost immediately with the onset of the disease. Their expense makes them limited to groups of the population least likely to be affected. The prescription process, which requires one to visit an MD and then the pharmacy, imposes a time restriction that nearly destroys any effectiveness of these medicines. Americans faced with a genuine and dangerous flu epidemic are likely to watch helplessly as they get medicines too late to have any real effect. Even then the medicine will be only available to the segment of the population least likely to have a problem.

I'm not fond of the mainstream medical community for this reason: their solution to problems is to prescribe chemicals that provide marginal effectiveness, and include some not-so-good side effects. Lovely.

Hand washing is an old technology that is profoundly effective against the flu. It works against all epidemic diseases with very high effectiveness. The level of its effectiveness is dramatic. Hospitals face serious disease threats daily. Many of these diseases lack any effective treatment and are profoundly dangerous. The universally effective measure that contains all of these diseases, is hand washing. It always works. It really doesn’t matter which disease.

No person needs to be treated for a disease that they do not catch. Hand washing stops, or severely reduces, the transmission of nearly every infectious disease. Hand washing stops the transmission of the flu with near total effectiveness. Effective hand washing is the cheap effective and a certain end to the flu. This is already known.

Even your politicians know about hand washing. Every candidate for public office learns to wash their hands repeatedly and often on the campaign trail or they just don’t make it. Hand shaking is possibly the most effective disease transmission method known. A politician who does not wash his hands gets too sick to win office. Rest assured the highest priority for any Presidential trip is to make sure that the hand washing is attended to. As soon as President Bush gets away from the cameras, he washes his hands.

So why are officials in a “panic?” The answer is that they are not in a panic. They are flying to the disease. They wash their hands! They are conducting a shake down by terror of the population of the world. The reasons are many. They all come down to power and money. Big Pharma, is up to shaking down the taxpayers. Politicians are after power. It all comes together. Why else would they propose sending soldiers around to solve this problem? A public campaign to encourage hand washing would solve the problem.

A doctor I met once said the same thing to me...wash your hands.

I would add to this: Build your immune system up, so your body can fight.

See also: Murder in the Medicine Cabinet: How Aspirin may have contributed to the Spanish Flu epidemic; and, Bird Flu for the Birds!--how the gov't might be the cause of the "Bird Flu" making the jump to humans.