Chicken Eggs and Swine Flu
Jason Kottke explains how the H1N1 vaccine is made — including the step where part of the virus is injected into eggs, where it incubates for two to three days before being removed.
Jason Kottke explains how the H1N1 vaccine is made — including the step where part of the virus is injected into eggs, where it incubates for two to three days before being removed.
In Seattle recently, I met a pulmonologist who said that the H1N1 virus has him busier than he’s ever been, his hospital beds full of flu patients. The uptick hit particularly hard about 10 days ago, he said.
How has the flu been playing out across the country?
A very common ailment in Korean summers and falls is pinkeye (conjunctivitis), and the problem had been getting much worse in the past two years. My Korean co-author tells me, however, that the H1N1 virus has created a positive externality in Korea.
For all the anxiety surrounding the spread of swine flu, some of the most effective flu countermeasures are also the cheapest and simplest: social distancing (keeping about three feet away from potentially infected people) and washing your hands.
I am writing this at 4:25 a.m. on Friday and I’m a bit woozy. On Wednesday afternoon, my body seriously crashed. On very short notice, my beloved spouse got me in to see to see a physician, who told me I definitely had a bad flu and the only one going around was the swine flu.
The good news is that I’ve been recovering just as quickly as I crashed. By Thursday morning, my 101.3 fever had broken, and while I still have a cough, the aches and chills are now largely gone. My body just feels extraordinarily tired. I tried going to sleep Thursday night without any cold medications.
As the recession lingers and swine flu spreads, it appears that the antiviral drug Tamiflu has now surpassed Viagra as the most commonly spammed drug on the internet.
Long before swine flu hit, Timothy Geithner testified to Congress about the danger of a strange new epidemic. “Contagion spreads,” he warned in 2008, “transmitting waves of distress to other markets.” The contagion was loan defaults, and Bear Stearns was patient zero. The Fed’s bailout of Bear, he hoped, would slow or stop the spread of defaults across the financial . . .
What made swine flu so worrisome was the high death toll it wrought in Mexico. Most of us assumed that the virus would be at least as lethal wherever it spread. It wasn’t. With the virus temporarily in retreat, current estimates show all but one of the swine flu deaths were confined to Mexico, and all but a few of . . .