West Nile Virus
Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 3:44 pm
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Excuse me, but...I'm not impressed.
OK, so a lady here in La Mesa (suburb of San Diego) was diagnosed with WNV last week. I saw the news online, did a quick walk-around of my property to be sure there was no standing water, and forgot about it.
Yesterday I got a Chicken Little-style "OMG, the sky is falling!" notice from the County Health Department, making it sound like the greatest threat to western civilization since Attila the Hun.
Seriously, I understand why they over-inflate the issue. One, they're bureaucrats, and if the threat is major, they get more funding. Two, if they understate the threat, and some fool gets sick, said fool will probably hire a lawyer and sue.
But still, how many exclamation points can a public health agency justify in one flyer?
To put this in perspective, annual deaths in the USA from WNV for the last four years ran - 100 , 119, 177, 124 (no, that's not a 12-digit number; It's four 3-digit numbers) . This is in a nation of over 300 million people! I'm willing to bet you more people than that died from being attacked by gerbils. And we're talking about a virus that was first isolated in 1937, people. This is not a new threat.
And one case in a city of 56,000+ is not an epidemic.
So I look it up online. It seems of those who are bitten by infected mosquitoes, many don't even get the disease. Of those who are actually measurably infected, the ratio goes like 100-30-1. For every 100 people who have no symptoms at all, there are 30 who get a mild fever and headaches with maybe some swelling of lymph glands, and one person who gets encephalitis.
But it's the frigging end of the world, people. Forget about the killer bees, killer earthquakes and Southern California falling into the sea, hole in the ozone layer, degradation of the environment, or whatever "panic topic du jour for those with too much time on their hands" was last up, this is the real one, and we're all going to DIE!
Does this kind of crap happen everywhere, or is it a uniquely American form of hysteria?
OK, so a lady here in La Mesa (suburb of San Diego) was diagnosed with WNV last week. I saw the news online, did a quick walk-around of my property to be sure there was no standing water, and forgot about it.
Yesterday I got a Chicken Little-style "OMG, the sky is falling!" notice from the County Health Department, making it sound like the greatest threat to western civilization since Attila the Hun.
Seriously, I understand why they over-inflate the issue. One, they're bureaucrats, and if the threat is major, they get more funding. Two, if they understate the threat, and some fool gets sick, said fool will probably hire a lawyer and sue.
But still, how many exclamation points can a public health agency justify in one flyer?
To put this in perspective, annual deaths in the USA from WNV for the last four years ran - 100 , 119, 177, 124 (no, that's not a 12-digit number; It's four 3-digit numbers) . This is in a nation of over 300 million people! I'm willing to bet you more people than that died from being attacked by gerbils. And we're talking about a virus that was first isolated in 1937, people. This is not a new threat.
And one case in a city of 56,000+ is not an epidemic.
So I look it up online. It seems of those who are bitten by infected mosquitoes, many don't even get the disease. Of those who are actually measurably infected, the ratio goes like 100-30-1. For every 100 people who have no symptoms at all, there are 30 who get a mild fever and headaches with maybe some swelling of lymph glands, and one person who gets encephalitis.
But it's the frigging end of the world, people. Forget about the killer bees, killer earthquakes and Southern California falling into the sea, hole in the ozone layer, degradation of the environment, or whatever "panic topic du jour for those with too much time on their hands" was last up, this is the real one, and we're all going to DIE!
Does this kind of crap happen everywhere, or is it a uniquely American form of hysteria?
