Episode Information
WWL: Preparing for the Swine Flu
Aired:
09/08/2009
Host:
State health officials say closing schools and wearing facemasks won’t prevent the expected spread of swine flu in the coming months.
So the question is, how do we prevent the spread of the disease – and how concerned should we be? Today, where we live, a swine flu history lesson. We’ll talk with infectious disease specialist Dr. Edwin Kilbourne, who worked on developing swine flu vaccines in the 1970's.
We’ll also hear from the Connecticut company making vaccines now, and from local health departments and schools about how they’re preparing for a potential outbreak.
Links for this Episode:
Fear mongering
Please see Dr. Mercola's website on the issue of
this "when pigs fly flu 'pandemic'"
Millions of people are educating themselves
by going to his website on how to protect
themselves from this flu and to protect themselves
from the governments fearmongering, and most, most
importantly the serious affects from the vaccination
itself. In his article today he talks about a German
doctor stating that cancer cells from animals dna
are in the vaccination. I implore you to get educated
rather quickly on this topic, especially if you have children.
The real fear monger
Mercola is nothing more than a master snake-oil salesman who is adept at using scare tactics to drive traffic to his web site. He has received at least two warning letters from the FDA about unsupported claims for the supplements he hawks. See this column that ran in Business Week a few years ago: http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/may2006/sb20060523_063274.htm
WNPR is being used by "Nadine," if that's a real person, to provide free advertising for this peddler of medical disinformation.
Listener email from James
An effective way to mobilize people facing a threat is to personalize it. In this case, if the estimate of probable fatalities is 90,000 in the US this year, CT's share would be about 9,000. If a third were school children, that would be about 400 for each of the six urban districts and about 20 per school district otherwise, on average. Averages don't predict actual cases, but such numbers do imply "it could be my child" without implying "it's SURE to be my child".
My question is, how should the public mind be balanced between disruptive yet possibly protective fear, and constructive yet possibly naïve maintenance of "normalcy"? The answer could avoid public panic after the first batch of fatalities occurs in our school population--God forbid.