Grippe Porcine, Prison Planet style

[lapsedmodernist]

The interesting fringy thing about the whole Swine Flu business is the brewing race/genefail in the public sphere. AP/Reuters ran an article about the ongoing investigations into the differences in the severity of the flu cases between Mexico and the US, while over at Prison Planet (and elsewhere on the interwebs), there are speculations about racially targeted biological weapons. Against the race of "hispanics" sometimes referred to as "Mexican hispanics."

The level of discourse is exemplified in the following offering from the comments thread:

They revised the number of deaths to 7 today, instead of 20. Like Dr. Ron Paul said, let’s not panic. How come there are no deaths in Spain? They are Ispanic [sic] too. That said, I would not be surprised that they do have this sort of bioweapon ready. It was Hitler’s dream… wait a minutes… that dream is still alive today amongst the same families that were there at that time.

and here is a bizarre postcolonial metanarrative from further down the thread:

First of all, in Mexico there are two different “races” of people. The Spanish immigrants and the native Mexicans like the Mayan decendents. This difference has evolved into class prejudice. However, the phenomena could support this wild theory, or it could simply be a health/diet/treatment problem.

If the upper class Spanich (European) decentends do not have the death rate as the less economic priveledged native Mexican decendents, that could still support a difference in the quality of healthcare/diet/treatment between the two classes

I am also reproducing the zeigeist award-winner comment, in which I approve of the pun/neologism Expirement w/r/t Tuskegee.

400+ Black Men in Alabama 1934 - 1970 were unknowingly injected with syphilis and given aspirin as a “cure” pill and other placebos for “Bad Blood” disease. This Expirement (misspelled on purpose) was conducted by a Government Agency. what I state here is fact and unfortunately “History” Has a way of changing his-self rapidly in this day and age. I am glad my Great-Great-Grandmother told me of this story when I was a young child before she passed away. So I am not surprised if this might be a beta testing of a ethno-centric bio weapon.
by the way MEXICO WITNESS please refrain from any further comments you are starting to sound ignorant. There have not been any “European (Caucasian) deaths reported thus far. I hate that this even happens to any race of people and it seems that our government sits back with their head shoved so far up their ass, and claims ignorance. Well it is bliss. “I was informed not too long ago and IT was a mistake.”?? does that sound familiar? We better open our eyes and ears and educate our loved ones of what is really happening there are plenty of distractions going on right to empower the NWO. or whoever these entities are that want to enslave us all. planes trains and automobiles. watch the contrails and not rattlesnake tails / tales. And where is my bailout? why can’t I own a Car Company? Or a house even? I would love to have a job right now.

Of course, Prison Planet is not represenative of anything beyond a strange bed containing conspiracy theorists, fringy Ron Paulites (redundant?), people who spend Too Much Time on the Internet, and zeitgeist-receptors in my brain forced into constant seizures between nanalala and this January. But in the last couple of days I've already encountered, IRL (and in European RL no less!) and on the interwebs, spectacular misunderstandings of sickle cell anemia, the nature of genetic drift, lack of any understanding that biologically speaking "race" is a cline, all kinds of fascinating 'loped-on-'loping authoritative descriptions of Mexico by people who've never been there (the usual tropes are: it's all slums outside the resorts, they have no functional health care system, the government lies--though I suppose that last one is fair, if it's true that the villagers in Veracruz were really told that there was no way they could have the flu because it was "eradicated from Mexico")

Also I already posted this on facebook, but here, have some irony:
Israeli official: Swine flu name offensive
JERUSALEM (AP) — The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed "Mexican" influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, said an Israeli health official Monday.

Comments

[twotoedsloth.livejournal.com]

Beta testing of an ethnocentric bioweapon!!!

[monkeypunk.livejournal.com]

I feel like a conspiracy theorist myself, in that recently all the news we in SoCal have been getting about Mexico has been wave after wave of drug kidnappings and murders, and how the local governments are powerless to stop them. Suddenly this flu outbreak comes along and everyone panics, and focus is shifted.

From an epidemiological standpoint the response is in no way justified. Essentially it does come down to a care issue, in that all strains identified thus far, even the hyper-virulent ones in Mexico, the CDC claims are also susceptible to anti-viral medications. So people who are dying who are not in the immuno-compromised groups that routinely die from flu (in much greater numbers than thus far reported) every single year are doing so because they either did not seek, or were denied access to medication.

The vaccines for the 1976 Swine Flu epidemic were created in such haste that they were contaminated, and a far greater number of people developed debilitating neurological illnesses from that than ever got sick from the flu. In fact, that hyped epidemic never actually materialized, but it seems like we've already forgotten that lesson, and instead reverted to the ignorance of panic because it sells more newspapers.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

From an epidemiological standpoint the response is in no way justified.

FWIW, my epidemiologist friends strongly disagree.

[exterra.livejournal.com]

mine too.

[monkeypunk.livejournal.com]

And mine do not, so obviously opinion is split.

[theophile.livejournal.com]

No, I think what you've written above reflects the informed consensus. There seems to be an extraordinarily bad trickle-down of information going on here, though, in which the fundamental unpredictability of influenza gets mixed with an extraordinarily off-base public understanding of the word "pandemic," and is exacerbated by the realistic acknowledgement of diligent epidemiologists that, yes, the worst-case scenario would in fact be very bad, and that yes, there will certainly be more deaths in either case. It's scary for a lot of people to hear phrases like "we don't know" and "we have to acknowledge that possibility" from world health experts when the question is "am I going to die?"

Oh what am I saying WAKE UP SHEEPLE JEW FLU WAS AN INSIDE JOB

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

From an epidemiological standpoint the response is in no way justified.

How do you figure? It is precisely from an epidemiological point of view that the response seems very much justified to me, given the scenario (new virus, no population immunity, sustained human-to-human transmission, which means it can quickly mutate into something a lot more lethal--it won't necessarily, but it definitely can).

[monkeypunk.livejournal.com]

But it isn't a completely new virus, it's a new combination of flu viruses that have been around, not all of which have been affecting human populations. Of course it can mutate into something more lethal, but so can TB microbes sharing cells with HIV. Flu mutates relatively slowly, which is why vaccines work.

There is going to be some population immunity just because of the nature of how immune systems work, and better surveillance is totally justified. Shutting down all the schools and proposing to do the same for government offices, I don't think is. I'm not saying it's not something to keep an eye on, i just think it's a bit early for full-fledged armaggeddon panic that seems to be sweeping everywhere, when the reality is that there's much worse stuff just as easily (if not more so) around and about all the time that hardly raises a public eyebrow.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind that 36,000 people died of the flu and pneumonia in the past year and there is no hair pulling in the press over it

I keep hearing that as a point made to put things in perspective, but it seem to me like a fallacy--it's apples and oranges. The freakout over this flu isn't that it has killed a lot of people--it's that it's a brand new strand of the virus, that no one in the population has any immunity to, and that is being transmitted between humans, and thus can rapidly mutate--at least that's the freakout in the public health sectors. In the Prison Planet comments section the freakout is...well, it's unclear what it is about, exactly, but it's definitely something to do with the metanarrative of late-stage capitalism.

[anthrokeight.livejournal.com]

I heard that swine/ Mexican flu thing from my bed today as I drowsed to NPR and thought "oh, you have to be kidding me. Really, Mr. Israeli Health Minister, you couldn't write fiction that good."

*sigh*

Who cares if it refers to swine in its name? It's influenza. It's not like you were going to invite it in and give it coffee, if only it wasn't referring to something completely treyf.

Swine= forbidden. Flu= not welcome because it's infectious. Mexicans= people with whom you might like to have a working relationship, if not a social one. Especially since as far as I am aware there are some lovely Jewish people living in Mexico doing their thing and being respectable citizens.

Naming your virus, people, is not rocket science.

[tomorrow-devil.livejournal.com]

That last bit just takes the cake! Semantic purity winning out over infection anxieties - what's up with Litzman? Or, is he preempting some kind of publc demand for correctness?