Public Health Officials Promulgated Swine Flu Scare
September 13, 2009 by Sal Marinello
Filed under The Healthy Skeptic
Next time you think public health officials are reliable, unbiased sources of information, refer back to the “Great Swine Flu Scare of 2009.”
We are in the age of crisis, in that every problem that we have to deal with becomes a crisis. Less than 10% of the population of the United States doesn’t have health care and it’s a crisis the other 90% has to deal with, pay for and suffer through. Two car manufacturers who have been poorly run for years finally run out of money and the government goes into crisis mode so that these companies can be bailed out. Something on the order of two percent of high school students are thought to use steroids and a, “performance enhancing drug crisis” threatens our kids.
The swine flu story is the perfect example of how our public health officials have let us down. For all the hubbub, hullabaloo, hassle, hoopla and hue and cry about the swine flu, it’s turned out to be just a flu. And not an epidemic killer flu, either.
As a matter of fact, 2009 will go down as one of the mildest flu seasons in a decade. A far cry from the projections of hundreds of thousands of deaths that these so-called experts were predicting. A lot of people have contracted the swine flu, but a lot of people get hang-nails, too. Far from a modern version of the Black Plague, the Swine Flu – to paraphrase Dr. Evil – is basically the diet Coke of flu, “Just one calorie, not evil (or flu) enough.” Deaths by flu have been at below epidemic levels.
According to the Harvard Health Newsletter acetaminophen is responsible for almost 460 deaths and over 56,000 emergency room visits every year. Amazingly, people die from drowning in less than of foot of water and 10 people die from drowning every day. Individual deaths can be tragic, but this doesn’t mean there’s a crisis.
Please, please, please steer clear of any swine flu remedies that you may come across. There is not a hell hot enough for these scammers. However, there wouldn’t be a place at the table for these low-life characters if the people we entrust with accurately and properly disseminating public health information had done their jobs.
As a matter of fact the Federal Trade Commission has released a list of over 130 fraudulent swine flu remedies and levied a fine against drug-store chain CVS for making unsubstantiated claims for its Air Shield flu remedy. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when public health officials are unreliable and a respected and established drug-store chain takes advantage of the situation.
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