Staying Alive!

We don't want to be accused of promoting fear. What we have always asserted is information is power. The more you know the less fear you should have. To contribute to less fear we thought we'd highlight the positive as well as the negative in yesterday and today's news. We also don't wish to be the "flu police!" Our concern is health care not disease care. Focusing on the disease of the season isn't our raison d'etre.

First things first, in our jurisdiction, the District of Columbia still publicly maintains no deaths to the H1N1 virus though privately the number of deaths reported to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for flu or pneumonia from the first week of 2009 to the thirty-ninth week of 2009 (last week) is 94 as compared to 60 in 2008 during the same week and 44 in 2007. That's the official report to the government. While Maryland seems to be the hotbed of flu reporting to the feds 585 though the official count is ten (10). It's the unreported that begs to be counted.

Baltimore adds three more infections in a single location from their police department. Again we have to point out this isn't the beginning of the flu season which "officially" begins in November. This is indeed a pandemic. Though not unexpected.

Current news reports from other parts of the country suggests that seniors are largely immune to this virus and need no be concerned with it because they've developed an immunity because the strain (H1N1) isn't substantially different from previous strains. Following the report released yesterday from Canada - that would appear to hold true:

"Unlike some previous flu pandemics, which saw high death rates among the very young and the very old, "severe disease and mortality in the current outbreak is concentrated in relatively healthy adolescents and adults between the ages of 10 and 60 years," the authors write. The observation that Canadian women were at higher risk of severe illness is "striking," the authors said, noting that other swine flu studies have not noticed such a pattern." "The explanation for increased risk of severe disease and death among females in this report is unclear but the role of pregnancy as a risk factor has been noted in previous influenza pandemics," the authors noted. While the authors call the patients studied "healthy," it should be noted that 95 per cent had some underlying risk factor, such as asthma, smoking, obesity or high blood pressure. The researchers found that once swine flu patients were sick enough to need hospital care, they declined very fast, usually requiring ventilators and advanced "rescue" treatments. Patients who become severely ill had symptoms for about four days before going to hospital and then often required intense care in the ICU within one or two days; their average ICU stay was 12 days. Shock and multi-organ failure were common; 81 per cent of the patients they studied needed to be put on ventilators."

Using our "every living individual is sacred" credo playing a numbers game isn't good enough. While the stats may be in your favor you might not "want to be in that number." Get the shot - don't take the risk.

BizJournal was the ONLY article written about the affect of the flu on the non-human "corporation" - which in theory we find distasteful. In practice we can understand and would even suggest, distasteful, the loss of employees due to the virus could or would create new employment opportunities for the current and large numbers of unemployeed. Seeing the pandemic as a natural way of "thinning the herd" to paraphrase Bill Maher is in direct opposition to our very existence.

We do support the South Florida's publication's "warning." We just wish it was more humanly rather than fiscally addressed. Though in their defensive that's how a corporation shows its concerns. It just survive so that the people whom it employs can continue to thrive.

Believe it or not some paper's columnist are prompting the people should just say NO to vaccine - from California no less. Promoting oxygen therapy as a pancea for all things that ail you Lynne Gordon's article says:

Just Say NO to The Swine Flu Vaccine of 2009! & Ten things you're not supposed to know about the swine flu vaccine "I personally am NOT going to take the Swine Flu vaccine for several reasons. There are too many 'firsts' with this vaccine and because it contains Squalene..."

"...This is the third vaccine made with Squalene. (The first was the Swine Flu Vaccine of 1976 which killed 25 people and paralyzed and crippled thousands. Lawsuits from the after-effects reached 1.3 billion dollars)"

Thankfully the "informer" is misinformed and one commenter to the article point by point refutes Gordon's accusations. Most glaringly in error is that the vaccine contains "Squalene." When critics are so much in error it makes it easier to dismiss the quackery of the uninformed.

What's noteworthy of the article is that we've found a kindred in the commenters blog with which we hope to develop an association and that squalene ingested orally in olives can actually be a preventative and makes our list as what you can do for a dollar to protect yourself in this viral season. While your flu shot might not be the real deal - olives are a natural. A/H1N1 Influenza Outbreak Timeline which we highly recommend for an international view of the flu.

"...[T]he current stock of U.S. swine flu vaccines does not contain adjuvants, according to Anne Schuchat, MD, in an informational video produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Schuchat does acknowledge that there is an emergency provision to use them — should the pandemic accelerate.

Adjuvants are being used in swine flu vaccines in countries outside of the United States, including Canada, Europe and Australia. However, even though Canada is using an adjuvanted vaccine, it has also ordered 1.8 million doses of the unadjuvanted vaccine for use in pregnant women and children under the age of 3."

Protect yourself - be informed and forearmed. You can survive this! Let's let not be apart of the thinning herd. But do NOT be afraid. You know what to do and now what must be done - and OLIVES plenty of olives! What could it hurt? Buy 'em from the dollar store and pop 'em like grapes!

If you feel ill or if your children are ill take your: "...children to the hospital if they have difficulty breathing, their skin turns gray or blue, are difficult to wake up or become irritable and can't stop crying."

"Warning signs, respiratory symptoms and high fever are reasons to seek care or talk to your health care provider," Schuchat said."

Smoke Attacks

Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Willing is not enough; we must do" - Goethe

Maybe its just us but we like to go to the source and maybe only "squints" can get away with submitting a "uncorrected proofs" prepublication copy. We were never allowed to submit such a thing when we were in school but that was a long time ago. The Goethe quote comes from the pages of the report. What they found and published as a scientific evidence was the title "Secondhand Smoke Exposure and Cardiovascular Effects - Making Sense of the Evidence" concludes that: "...that data consistently demonstrates that secondhand-smoke exposure increases the risk of coronary heart disease and heart attacks and that smoking bans reduce this risk. Given the prevalence of heart attacks, and the resultant deaths, smoking bans can have a substantial impact on public health."

This might be news to smokers and the paid defenders of the "right to smoke"campaign but for those of us challenged breathers this isn't news. While some people might remember the movie Basic Instinct for Sharon Stone's legs - for us it was the lighting of her cigarette that preceded the crossing. That kind of smoke attack strikes us whenever we see a dangerous gang of smokers crowding the entrance of some public building. You have to take a deep breath before crossing their path and holding it until you can clear the area. This same type of physical reaction can occur whenever a person is terrified of being attacked.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a statement in support of the report saying:

• "Exposure to secondhand smoke could cause acute coronary events, such as a heart attack.
• Evidence suggests that even brief secondhand smoke exposure might trigger a heart attack.
• Smoke-free bans decrease acute coronary events."

One of the wonderful things about our smokefree DC though there is no smokefree MD or VA. Whenever we travel south and stop through VA we have to share air space with smokers separated only by a door or partition. Whether or not Virginia adopts or makes any changes to current laws or not is yet to be determined. To those of us desperate to breath we'll just have to hold our breaths until then.

Bill Maher who we credit with the "thinning the herd" comment smoked up until a few (more than nine) years ago. Who knew that he was actively pursuing that goal. Now we know!

While we certainly felt attacked and all but the most dense of smokers thought somehow blowing their smoke in the air was effort enough for us as long as it wasn't in our faces. It's doubtful that even this report will be received with any more belief. To again quote Maher not as long as our Government "is a Mafia that wants a cut."