There has been much ado about a certain member of the influenza A family which I will abstain from naming because you are probably tired of hearing the name. In the midst of hysteria, flagrant and insulting paternalism, and disingenuous concern for everyone with a runny nose and a cough, I hope to bring a few new facts to your attention, ones that may put your mind at rest, or maybe freak you out even more. Who knows which it will be, but you’d better keep reading – Jesus and the CDC agree that it could mean your life.
Let’s have a quick recap. Swine flu is a member of the influenza A family. It rarely affects humans, but somewhere in Mexico something went horribly wrong and it has made the jump. It now threatens to engulf the world in an apocalyptic pandemic. Impressive measures have been implemented, from the installation of hand sanitizers at a higher density than Starbucks, to volumes of email rivaling those freshmen receive from their mothers (In loco parentis yet lives; somebody kick it again).
But I digress. Here are a few important things you probably don’t know about the aforementioned virus. 36,000 people die every year from the regular flu and 200,000 are hospitalized. There were 5,011 “confirmed and probable” (in other words, maybe swine flu) hospitalizations and of those 302 died. I’m no epidemiologist, but those figures mean that six percent of all “suspected” hospitalized swine flu victims have died, versus eighteen percent of hospitalized influenza victims last year.
Also, while those spiffy new hand sanitizers loom from every available surface just begging to be squeezed, you might think twice about using them. Your skin is actually more than just a water-proof surface that prevents you from spilling your precious bodily fluids everywhere or being literally washed out when you go swimming or run through the sprinkler systems in the swamp behind Cro.
The skin is a complex microbial habitat with its own delicate ecology. Disturbing that ecology with hand sanitizer or antibacterial soap is like dropping a nuclear bomb on a perfectly good forest. (And if you want me to defend that analogy in light of natural disasters like forest fires, I will, but I don’t have the word count here to fly off on such tangents).
Anyway, the natural microbial ecology of the skin can aid the body in fighting infection, and using hand sanitizers and antibacterial soaps destroy all hope of that.
So by all means, wash your hands after contact with icky things, but otherwise you may do more harm than good. In addition, hand sanitizers often contain Triclosan, a chemical that does all kinds of nasty stuff. It also happens to be a pesticide. Isn’t your FDA responsible? And last, as if the disease itself wasn’t enough, you should be wary of the swine flu vaccine.
Seriously, the doctors and nurses won’t take it, so why should you?
