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Showing posts with label mexican flu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mexican flu. Show all posts

Friday, November 6, 2009

The Luxemburg Flu


Isn't this a tad strange? We have this website monitoring the numbers of Belgians infected by the Mexican flu. I personally still don't know too many people actually being sick. A lot of them, myself included, have a cough or a slight cold ... and even those with a flu have the flu (the regular flu or the other one: there is not much difference except when you belong to a risk group. Every GP will tell you that).

But look at this map!

Wouldn't you expect the major cities to be critical in spreading this disease? Where people are packed together in schools, office buildings, on trams and busses, on the subway and on the train?

But no, it is our lovely, green, very lightly populated provice of Luxemburg that carries the crown. Or did they switch the legends and the colours? Are we talking Luxemburg Flu now? Not even enough pigs in Luxemburg to consider a semantic mashup ...

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

mexican flu, media flu

There is something weird about this Mexican flu thing. Last weekend, Expert Number One Marc Van Ranst, explained in De Standaard that his apocalyptic view of 7 deaths/day this autumn/winter in a worst case scenario is not out of the ordinary. Every year a 1000 people die during a 3 month flu-peak ... that's ten a day. Every day 3 people get infected with HIV in Belgium. And the same number with TBC. Nobody gives a damn. But now that we have 126 cases of confirmed flu we read about emergency scenario's, local communities preparing, hospitals trying out and the army (!!!) distributing vaccins and masks to 15 distribution points. Did some high up offcial read the 'Outbreak' script perhaps? Djeezes!