On the Road to Find Out

Almost every newspaper I open has a one-page advert for Influenza. I think there’s better things to spend your money on.

It seems that swine flu is following me around. Every day I have seen more and more people wearing face masks. A teacher friend in Rio has been given the month off from work. She’s outraged. They want to make her work all Saturdays when she returns so that she won’t have lost any days. Apparently, there has been almost 200 deaths. Almost all of them occurring in the South of Brazil, where winter is definitely at its worst.

Of the deaths, only 16 have occurred in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Of which, most have been children or pregnant women. I think wearing a facemask on the street seems a little over-the-top. There are 15 million people living in Rio state. Surely the odds are against ever contracting it.

For the latest death toll visit here.

I left Argentina last week, but I want it to be known that this had nothing to do with the fact that Argentina now has the highest death toll of any country from Swine Flu (Gripe Porcina or Gripe A, to give it it’s Spanish name). I can’t believe how much panic the Government have been causing there. After closing the Universities and Schools, they issued a special Police division with green jerseys for dealing with the infection, made all Police wear dust masks, almost banned supporters from the last day of the football season (they decided 3 days before that they would be allowed and so started selling tickets) and advised everyone not to spend long periods of time in crowded environments. So it was, that after buying my tickets for the footy a fly managed to land at the top of my throat just as I was catching the bus. After trying to dislodge it as I bought my ticket I started uncontrollably coughing. Trying to stop the coughing was a mammoth task, and allied with all the eyes that were fixed and slowly retreating away from me, I was getting quite a sweat on. After getting it under control, I felt very alone. I was the only person on that bus without some kind of garment covering their mouth. At least I had plenty of room to move around.

For more info on the flu in Argy

The thing that gets me about this whole thing is that every year hundreds of thousands of people die from the flu. They die from bog-standard, ordinary flu. And that’s just the one’s we know about. It also contributes to deaths from a variety of other illnesses, but never gets mentioned as the cause, because well it’s just the flu isn’t it. Heart disease, coronary illnesses, that’s what people die from. Now that swine flu is the most talked about illness on the planet, it’s really no surprise that it gets one positive diagnosis after another. Any other year, there would have been a footnote about 5 pages in from the back of The Sun, stating that Micah Richards will be missing Man City’s pre-season training because of the flu, now it’s front page.