http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/guidance_homecare.htm?s_cid=tw_epr_61
*I kinda hate to spread more panicky news about swine flu, even though this helpful document is the picture of dry bureaucratic accuracy.
People freak out over "pandemics," even though we've got one of the worst pandemics in history, AIDS, raging through the carcass of the body-politic right now. Every once in a while you see a street demo or a charity show about AIDS. Carla Bruni is pretty big on fighting AIDS.
Otherwise we just drop dead of AIDS in hecatombs, and the pandemic has become our business as usual.
AIDS is an extremely fearsome disease, practically 100% lethal, yet it's hard work to get people to remain properly afraid of it.
*There is always some flu around and flu is always killing some people. Even when a raw mutant flu manages to kill off more people than a shooting-war, flu has never ravaged whole cities as cholera or the Black Death can do. As awful pandemics go, flu is like the snotty-nosed little sister of awful pandemics.
*So if you catch the new swine flu, you're very likely not gonna die.
*But since it is a flu, you're gonna kinda WISH you could die.
*You're not ACTUALLY gonna die unless your lips are turning blue, you have bad chest pains, you can't swallow water, you can't stand up, you're having seizures and you don't know where you are or what your name is.
As this document suggests, you're gonna want to watch out for those symptoms.
*If you already suffer those medical conditions for any other reason and you ALSO get swine flu, then yes, you are in mortal peril, because that extra kick from Little Sister can do you in.
*One other big-government tip here. If you live in one of our planet's new health-service-free zones, the "Non-Integrating Gap," the "Failed States," the "Hollow States," the impenetrable favelas, barrios, feral cities, the Al Qaeda mountain valleys and the yo-ho-ho nouveau-riche guy Somalian Pirate Zones, and so forth.... And it this new flu turns out to be one of those variants that breaks the test-tube and stomps around the landscape at will... well, you and your nearest-and-dearest are especially in for it.
*Don't bother picking up the satellite phone and punching 911, because the civilized world's emergency services won't go any place where they shoot down helicopters.
*I'd suggest carefully reading this home-style health-care document and stocking the camp or the bunker with alcohol hand rubs. Either that, or cook up some brilliant new global-guerrilla doctrine for fighting microbes.
As for me, I'm a tireless global vector and I'm also very prone to respiratory illnesses.
So a mutant 21st century swine flu would be well-nigh perfect for me. Once I caught the flu while reading Stephen King's THE STAND. As I twitched in my bed with hallucinatory high fever, the television in the next room ceaselessly babbled about the Jonestown mass suicide.
I was convinced the world was ending. That was 31 years ago.
After that experience, the massive global pandemic doomster thing has all been downhill for me.
I just can't get worked up about it; the reality never matches the technicolor hype.
