Hi Folks,<\/p>\n
This is Planet Waves shortstop Cam Hassard chiming in with some of the day\u0432\u0402\u2122s juicier nuggets. If you have other bits of exciting or odd news, please do post them to the comments area below or email me at cam.hassard (at) gmail.com. They said after my 111th column I would get my own Planet Waves email address, so you’ll be hearing from me a lot.<\/p>\n
To say it\u0432\u0402\u2122s been a difficult task to get away from the media saturation is a fair understatement. It’s like getting away from pork at a wedding. After waking up in a warm sweat this morning, I was thrilled to find that it was more due to the overheated roasting Sun spilling across Queens rather than a personal outbreak of swine flu. Despite growing reports of flu cases around the world, respectfully, no one has lost their life from it outside Mexico. Meanwhile thousands have died of complications from ordinary influenza this year; this is an ongoing issue. Flu is not good for you or other living things.<\/p>\n
In an interesting lowdown from the ABC<\/a> <\/strong>[kind of like the BBC, only American] <\/strong>the writers demonstrate a history of pandemic-esque circumstances and our collective tendency toward panic. it seems that when the big boys cry wolf, anxiety sets in so much that we remain essentially unsure whether to ignore it, pat it or shoot it.<\/p>\n We reported yesterday that the dubious corporation Baxter stands to make a lot of money from this whole situation, despite well-reported prior negligence where the health of the public is concerned. For big pharmaceuticals it\u0432\u0402\u2122s business as usual — or, perhaps, unusual. With probable boosts in profit from anti-swine medicine, a number of drug companies’ share prices went up significantly this week, particularly Gilead Sciences, manufacturer of Tamiflu. (Gilead, in case you were wondering, was where Rummy used to make big, responsible decisions before becoming Bush\u0432\u0402\u2122s number one defense lackey, and the co-inventor of that brilliant thing known as Iraq.)<\/p>\n Gilead shares would no doubt explode in the event of a pandemic: the FDA has just created measures for Tamiflu to be broadly dispensed in an emergency<\/a><\/strong> — even to children under the age of 1, which goes against requirements of the drug\u0432\u0402\u2122s own label. The problem with Tamiflu is that it’s ineffective unless used within 48 hours after exposure, that is to say, considerably before symptoms have appeared. So what do you do, take it every day? As a supplement? A prophylactic?<\/p>\n Additionally, Time<\/a><\/strong> primes the scene for a dose of collective jabbing, harking back to lessons apparently learned from the more mild swine flu outbreak of 1976. Without screaming paranoid rants about government control and New World Order (I’ll save that for late at night, when everyone is a little extra paranoid), I find this stuff highly dubious as well as interesting.<\/p>\n Ultimately, it\u0432\u0402\u2122s very noticeable how after consuming the plate for the past few weeks, pesky economic issues and things like torture memos<\/strong><\/a> have suddenly and very rapidly fallen by the wayside. Maybe we\u0432\u0402\u2122re dealing with our first major case of \u0432\u0402?Wag the Pig\u0432\u0402\u2122. As usual, the ever-faithful Onion reports <\/a><\/strong> promotes some healthy perspective.<\/p>\n Until next time, for Planet Waves this is<\/p>\n Cam Hassard<\/strong> Hi Folks, This is Planet Waves shortstop Cam Hassard chiming in with some of the day\u0432\u0402\u2122s juicier nuggets. If you have other bits of exciting or odd news, please do post them to the comments area below or email me at cam.hassard (at) gmail.com. They said after my 111th column I would get my own … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":488,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14360"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/488"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNew York City<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"