Maybe I'm just too ignorant to understand it
Can anyone explain to me a couple of things about the swine flu?
1. If it's no longer only catchable from pigs, but now transmits human-to-human, why give it a special name? Isn't it just a "flu," albeit a particularly bad one? (This question motivated by the country of Egypt and its stupid decision to kill all their pigs.)
2. How is this flu different from other flus? Don't they all kill people? Is swine flu more deadly than the average "really bad" flu? I mean, it so far has only killed people in Mexico.* (Not that I am insensitive to the loss of life in Mexico, but it argues for some local-condition issue, not a this-is-exceptionally-bad-flu issue.)
3. It has now appeared all around the world. Are there any theories why? (Excluding nutbag 12 Monkeys theories.) Has this flu possibly been going around for weeks or months, but only now is being noticed because it started killing a conspicuous number of people in Mexico?
4. Is that number conspicuous, really? What's a "normal" death rate for a flu? What's a "normal" death rate for a flu in Mexico, specifically?
5. Is this not the same swine flu that made the rounds in 1976? Is it any deadlier today than 33 years ago? (I ask that question as the granddaughter of one of the people who died possibly because of the swine flu vaccine.) ETA: Nope, it isn't. Entirely different virus. We need better naming conventions.
6. How does a flu lie dormant for 33 years and then resurface? (Argh, back to the 12 Monkeys nutbag scenario.) It doesn't. See above ETA.
I mean, I've had influenza twice in my adult life, and it was the most miserable-sick I've ever been. Freezing and shivering while running 104°+ fever and huddled under five heavy blankets. Sitting on the toilet with a bowl on my lap because I was losing it out both ends of my alimentary canal. Wishing, quite honestly, that I would just die already, if I couldn't get better quickly, because the aches in my bones were so horrible. Asking my mother to call me up every hour or two to make sure I was still alive because breathing was so difficult.
Those flus were in years when the vaccine was mispredicted and they chose the wrong one, and everyone was coming down with the flu. I don't recall if there was a death toll, but I believe there was. I can only imagine that something that made robust-me feel so miserable would be deadly to people whose systems were compromised or weak to begin with.
This post motivated by WHO bumping the classification up to level 5 on their pandemic scale.
*Yes, and one kid in the US, but he was a Mexican kid visiting relatives in Texas.