Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Swine Flu: The New Pandemic
    Swine Flu: The New Pandemic
    Swine Flu: The New Pandemic
    Ebook128 pages1 hour

    Swine Flu: The New Pandemic

    By Marc Siegel

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Contents

    Introduction

    1. Pandemic Basics

    2. 1918 versus 1976

    3. The Swine Flu Timeline

    4. All You Need to Know

    Bibliography

    Index

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurner Publishing Company
    Release dateSep 30, 2009
    ISBN9780470592687
    Swine Flu: The New Pandemic
    Author

    Marc Siegel

    Dr. Siegel is a prolific writer, a Clinical Professor of Medicine at New York University School of Medicine, a Medical Director of Doctor Radio at NYU and SiriusXM, a Fox News Medical Correspondent, a frequent columnist for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, Slate, FoxNews.com, National Review Online and Forbes Online, and a member of the board of contributors at USA Today.

    Read more from Marc Siegel

    Related to Swine Flu

    Related ebooks

    Wellness For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Cochrane Ousted Researcher Over Improper Use Of Letterhead, Board Co-chair Says

      Sep 28, 2018

      The Cochrane Collaboration ousted a researcher because he repeatedly misused official letterhead to espouse personal views, the board co-chair says.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Anatomy Of A Pandemic

      Jul 24, 2020

      Anatomy Of A Pandemic
      19 min read

    • Article

      The Bacteria You Want In Your Life

      Oct 6, 2021

      Mycobacterium vaccae was discovered on the shores of Lake Kyoga in Uganda in the 1970s by John Stanford, an immunologist. Today, Dr Chris Lowry, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, has shown that this bacterium can reduce stress a

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Infection Connection

      Nov 24, 2019

      The Infection Connection
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Sunshine Vitamin

      Sep 27, 2020

      Vitamin D is not a vitamin at all—it was misnamed as such when it was discovered in the early 20th century, but it is actually a hormone made in the skin from sunlight. Its role in bone health has been known for decades—a deficiency can cause soft bo

      1 min read

    • Article

      Stung By The jab?

      Jan 22, 2023

      Stung By The jab?
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Immortality Hype: Despite the hyperbole, private funding is changing the science of aging for the better.

      May 26, 2016

      It’d be easy to miss the unobtrusive brown door to Joon Yun’s second floor office, tucked away next to a dry cleaners and a hair salon in downtown Palo Alto, California. But the address itself speaks loud enough. Four-hundred-seventy University Avenu

      17 min read

    • Article

      Common Cold Wipes The Floor With Covid-19 Virus

      Jul 25, 2021

      Forget powerful drugs or even vaccinations, one of our most powerful allies against Covid-19 could be the common cold. The human rhinovirus, which causes the cold, wipes the floor with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, biologically speaking. It triggers an inter

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Unbalanced Diet: Why You Need High-dose Vitamins

      Jan 23, 2022

      Ask Dr Google if you need to take vitamins, and you’ll get the emphatic answer that, no, you don’t, as you get all the nutrients you need from eating a healthy, balanced diet. Ask the more pointed question, “Are vitamins a waste of money?”and you get

      5 min read

    • Article

      ‘Physicians Need To Be Aware’

      Mar 16, 2021

      There’s an entire medical textbook, Vaccines and Autoimmunity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), in which dozens of researchers and doctors survey the literature linking vaccines to autoimmune diseases from alopecia to ulcerative colitis. It is mostly inconclu

      1 min read

    • Article

      Lessons From Past Pandemics

      Apr 23, 2020

      Lessons From Past Pandemics
      7 min read

    • Article

      It’s Germ Warfare

      Mar 16, 2020

      It’s Germ Warfare
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Swine Flu

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Swine Flu - Marc Siegel

      001

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Copyright Page

      Dedication

      Introduction

      Chapter 1 - Pandemic Basics

      The Spanish Flu

      Flu Origins

      Other Twentieth Century Pandemics

      The H5N1 Bird Flu

      Chapter 2 - 1918 versus 1976

      The Blue Death

      1976 Swine Flu

      The Swine Flu Never Came

      Guillain-Barré Syndrome

      Then and Now

      Chapter 3 - The Swine Flu Timeline

      April 2009: The Worried Bus Driver

      May 2009: Boots on the Ground and Press Conferences

      June 2009: The First Wave?

      July 2009

      August 2009

      Late August 2009: The President’s Council of Advisors

      September 2009

      Chapter 4 - All You Need to Know

      Essential Questions and Answers

      Bibliography

      Index

      001

      Copyright © 2009 by Marc Siegel. All rights reserved

      Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

      Published simultaneously in Canada

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

      Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

      The information contained in this book is not intended to serve as a replacement for professional medical advice. Any use of the information in this book is at the reader’s discretion. The author and the publisher specifically disclaim any and all liability arising directly or indirectly from the use or application of any information contained in this book. A health care professional should be consulted regarding your specific situation.

      For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.

      Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.

      eISBN : 978-0-470-59268-7

      To my beloved son Samuel Benjamin Siegel

      Introduction

      Contagions are not new. They have existed throughout history, and one might say the perception that your neighbor will one day infect you has interfered with social intercourse throughout time. Infectors are perceived as dirty, unkempt, secret germ factories. They are not people we love easily. Whenever I see a patient in my office who says he has been exposed to scabies or bedbugs, I can’t get out of there fast enough or wash my hands frequently enough. And keep in mind that I am a physician who has written about overblown perception of risk; I can only imagine how a person on the subway feels sitting next to one of these patients.

      Since the microscopic culprits of infections are themselves unseen, they are perceived by potential victims as mysterious, imagined as deadly, and subject to immediate exaggeration and distortion. With the contagions throughout history, there always have been two problems: the contagion itself, as well as the sense that the outbreak or epidemic is far worse than it actually is. This is the prime reason why regional quarantine, or roping off a region, doesn’t work to contain an emerging bacteria or virus. People who are afraid tend to take fewer precautions, as the powerful emotional brain interferes with the ability to reason. Not only that, but as occurred during the massive Black Death in fourteenth century Europe, when more than a third of the population became infected over a three-year period, regional quarantine was ineffective; those who were restrained tended to panic and attempt to escape. That sense of terror has been transmitted down through the centuries to today even though, with the aid of modern medicine, we have less reason to be afraid.

      As I will describe in chapter 2, fear of another 1918 not only fueled the vast overreaction to a potential pandemic in 1976, but it also influences how we react and overreact to the real and emerging pandemic now. The powerful mental gates of heavy emotion cause us to alternatively overestimate and then underestimate a problem. And it isn’t only flu. The human response to contagions always has been out of proportion to the risk. In this book I cover both the real and the imagined concerns about influenza, the way that history both informs the debate but also sets us up for a hair trigger response. After all, conditions have changed drastically since 1918, and we have all these ways to combat contagions that we lacked back then. Plus, the deadly virus that evolved via likely mutation and returned with a vengeance that fall represented an extremely unlikely historical occurrence.

      Still, we are informed by our emotions at least as much as we are by the facts. It is not surprising that among my most flu-literate patients is Arnold, a ninety three-year old whose grandmother died of the Spanish flu when he was an infant. But it isn’t this man who is most worried; he says that though his grandmother died, she died of pneumonia after recovering from the flu. Arnold also points out that several other family members had milder cases and survived. Arnold is not really afraid of the flu; he sees it in perspective, based on his personal experience. But everyone else in his family, his children as well as his grandchildren, are worried, and they call me every week to find out when the H1N1 swine flu vaccine will become available. Their negative imaginations are fueled by Arnold’s story from his infancy; they imagine the dark rooms and the brooding, downtrodden faces far more than he does. Responses to an emerging contagion are fueled as much by worries and rumors as by facts. A study from England warns that the antiviral drug Tamiflu may be poorly tolerated and ineffective in children, and this quickly becomes dogma despite a mass of evidence (including my own) to the contrary. I lose an important medical arrow from my quiver. Next, fears are stoked that the new vaccine could cause ascending paralysis (Guillain Barré syndrome), just as the last swine flu vaccine appears to have done in one in one hundred thousand patients. But even if that worst case scenario turns out to be true, there is an important difference between today and the 1976 swine flu scare. This time there is a real pandemic virus, infecting many millions. We need the vaccine.

      Contagions throughout history have been characterized by intense emotions that accompany killer pathogens. These emotions are understandable. Our primitive fear of death is tied to the unknown, connected by our lifeblood to an invisible microbe.

      1

      Pandemic Basics

      In 1997,

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1