Posted on 04/28/2009 4:08:14 PM PDT by Joiseydude
Breaking now on FNC
DC-VA-MD Ping
HIV isn't airborne.
Mexico knows something is going on, and the last reported death rate was near 10% which is something to worry about, particularly if an initial infection fails to provide you immunity from a second infection with the same bug (a bizarre characteristic of swine flu anyway).
“Local Fox affiliate says passengers from AirTran Flight 85 from Cancun to BWI cleared, included 2 with possible flu illness”
Uh, none of them were Mexican ~ they'd simply gone there for a visit.
Cleared as in allowed to debark?
Poor slum dwellers with weakened immune systems, like the very young and the elderly, will shrug this one off like yesterday's Washington Post.
Get real, you know the answer is GAY JUDGES.
O’Reilly just had a doctor on that said there is a rapid test for it; however she also said the regular test still needs to be done- whether the rapid test is positive or negative. She didn’t come out and say the rapid test was not reliable, but she hemed and hawed around about it. So your question is very valid- how do they know so soon? If they are using a rapid test how reliable is it?
Seems to be....
So you do a field test on a plane of 100 people. You get one positive hit and 99 negatives. So you have potentially 5 people who have had their wits scared out of them, but they are infected. 5 days from now...they start to feel flu. How much you wanna bet they get to the doctor faster than someone from the general population. Plus you already had the results within 24 hours. Or you really did have 99 negatives.
What I wanna know is sensitivity of the lab tests. Are they sensitive enough to pickup someone infected 4 hours ago, 3 hours, 2 hours, in the last 1/2 hour of the flight? Does protocol require distribution of antivirals to everyone on the flight?
The doctor didn’t comment on the sensitivity as to how soon the tests may work. She was discussing a patient that was in Mexico two weeks ago; fell ill and now seems to be recovering. The doctor’s concern was the family members and others that have been in contact with this patient. The patient was given a rapid test- results neg., but doctor still had tests sent to lab for further testing. The doctor did not mention testing the family members of the patient so maybe the tests don’t really work until symptoms are there.
It’s true that statistically we have less of a possibility of having deaths. Also, it’s possible that Mexico’s statistics aren’t accurate, either because they weren’t tracking things like this very carefully, or because they didn’t want to scare off the tourists. So who knows what the real numbers are?
I read that there were actually two flus circulating in Mexico in late March, although the Mexicans didn’t realize this at the time. One was pretty standard and had the usual death rate among the usual vulnerable groups and was occurring during the normal flu season there. The other was only identified after it exhibited unusual behavior (reinfection, for example) and caused sudden deaths among non-vulnerable groups (healthy 25-45 yr olds).
Well, the downside is that if they are confined to the aircraft, they have all now been exposed.
Especially not Butterball Mikulski, who’s in Baltimore.
I think that's true. But it still doesn't explain why Americans, who are probably cleaner than anybody (!), aren't getting it as severely as healthy Mexicans.
Has it mutated? Most middle-class Mexicans are primarily of European descent and don't have a lot of Indian blood, although they would be primarily descended from Europeans from the Mediterranean region. I wonder if this could be a factor? The genetic material in the flu from the northen Midwest is unlikely to have come from Mediterraneans, so possibly Americans of northern European descent have been more exposed or have more resistance to it than southern Europeans.
The Mexicans who seem to be most affected (to the extent of dying) are healthy young people. I would suspect that most of them are not of primarily Indian descent, since most of the indigenous people or their very close descendants live in the more outlying areas and are not well off. Middle class urban people in Mexico are mostly of European descent, which includes Spanish, French, Irish, and German; in addition, a fair number of Mexicans have Jewish ancestry.
It was diagnosed first in the US (cases were March 28 and 30), so it has probably had about the same time to spread here. When I looked at the map, it seemed as if it had spread through Baja and then somehow ended up in southern Gulf Coast Mexico (the resort area). Mexico City is not too far inland, and a lot of Mexicans themselves go to their vacation areas, so possibly it then entered Mexico City from there.
In any case, it hasn’t spread that much here, even in California where it was first found, and no American has died of it, for some reason.
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