Is This The Long Awaited Pandemic?

[Jan Klimkowski]

I had a bit of a laugh with my Doc about when I got to see him - we usually spend more time discussing ephemera than my trivial medical concerns anyway - He told me that indeed they were given strong advice - to be ignored at their peril - to treat the whole question of 'Swine flu' as a grave risk and to give it prominence etc etc. I suggested he substitute 'Pig' for 'Swine' and make the position of the sign pause a little less inviting of ridicule.

But we agreed that to have a good chuckle at it was probably in the nature of a tonic - better capable of staving it off (and less potentially damaging) than the mercury-adjuvant containing vaccine they were offering - and being number-of-doses-administered targeted on.

I think we should call it Big Pharma Big Profit Flu from now on. However, as that is rather cumbersome, I'm happy to shorten it to plain vanilla Pig Flu.

Like David G and Peter P I can confirm that, in the UK, diagnosis of Pig Flu was no diagnosis at all. If you sneezed, you were told to quarantine yourself at home and guzzle chicken soup whilst wearing several moth-eaten jumpers. If you insisted, you could call a central number where your phonecall would be answered by people recruited from the local Job Centre Plus, who would ask you some questions, tick some boxes, and if enough boxes were ticked, a courier (possibly also recruited from the queues at the local Job Centre Plus) would shove some Tamiflu through your letter box and run away.

I didn't have any symptoms, but many people I know had the above process inflicted on them. In addition, none of them had anything more debilitating than minor flu symptoms and perhaps a brief period of the trots.

So, yes, the real incidence of Pig Flu amongst the more regular flus was either tiny or Pig Flu really is so mild as to be an irrelevance.

The profits of Big Pharma were not irrelevant.

Peter - the comments of your GP about the central government advice, or more accurately pressure, he received to treat Pig Flu as a "grave risk" are interesting and also ring true.