re: #119 realwest

Hey ping - I have NO IDEA of what she said, I do know that the head of the CDC stopped just short of calling it a flu pandemic but they are all over this thing.
Now we’ve apparently got students in a NYC school who’ve come down with this flu.
This could get to be very bad indeed.

Glenn Reynolds has a link, to WaPo:

“U.S. public health officials did not know about a growing outbreak of swine flu in Mexico until nearly a week after that country started invoking protective measures, and didn’t learn that the deaths were caused by a rare strain of the influenza until after Canadian officials did… . U.S. public health officials are still largely in the dark about what’s happening in Mexico two weeks after the outbreak was recognized.”

A lot of this, (IMO: I have no inside knowledge), has to do with Obama’s joke of an appointment process. Remember that Obama was going to put Tom Daschle in charge of Health and Human Services. Daschle is about my least favourite person in American politics, if you don’t count the crypto-Brichers; he is nothing more than a party hack and a lobbyist flack. His abortive appointment was a Dem version of Heckuvajob Brownie at FEMA, and the circus around it must have been demoralising for everyone involved in the HHS / CDC nexus. It showed that Obama cared more about rewarding cronies and nationalising healthcare than about actual public health.