Will You Survive The Swine Flu?

Most of us have had the flu.  The symptoms of the flu are extreme exhaustion, as differentiated from mild exhaustion due to boredom, painful muscle spasms, upset stomach,  or what is known as feeling sick to your stomach, whatever that means, and half-conscious sleep.  What is a half-conscious sleep, did you say?  It is that unrestful falling off into unconsciousness, consciousness which means that you are laying down, probably snoring but, you can actually hear yourself snoring.

So, you think you have the dire swine flu named H1N1 from the virus that causes the popular flu, more threatening than war.  Well, since no doctor will test you for it, anymore, you have to assume that if you have those symptoms, and you live in the United States, that you have the swine flu. According to the health advisers to the White House, the H1N1 virus will sicken half the population of the those living in the United States before 2011.  But, look up folks, if you haven’t caught the bug yet chances are you might escape since we are now into late September, when the falling leaves are saying, wait, wait for it to snow bugs. 

Drifting away into the semi-comatose state of influenza, I read that the World Health Organization statistics show that 1 billion doses of the H1N1 vaccine have been requisitioned from laboratories.  That’s the good news and the bad news is that planet Earth has 61/2 billion humans.  If you failed elementary subtraction and algebra, that means that only 15 % of the human population will have access to the vaccine. 

And, those 15% who will have access to the vaccine will live in wealthy countries as the vaccine makers have their fortunes to consider.  We can be thankful that only 1% of those who get the H1N1 virus will actually die.   That percentage is small, but if we use our elementary mathematics,  .01 per cent of 6,500,000 million = equals 65,000 thousand deaths. 

I am predicting that most of those deaths will occur in countries who not only do not have access to the vaccine, but whose living conditions are already killing their populations without the added direful consequence of swine flu or H1N1.