re: #162 Killgore Trout

It does raise an interesting point. It doesn’t seem to be very contagious outside of Mexico (yet). I don’t know if any of the Americans infected with pig flu caught it here in the states.

I was just reading yesterday’s daily CDC press briefing on this point. It’s actually a pretty lame briefing. The CDC spokesperson here isn’t even saying how many of the U.S. cases were people who had traveled to Mexico. She does say that the CDC is pretty sure that person-to-person transmission is possible. And it seems to me that person-to-person transmission in Mexico is no different from person-to-person transmission in another country, so therefore there’s no reason why one should have to travel to Mexico to get the disease.

On the other hand, young healthy people were dying from the flu in Mexico, and it looks like the few confirmed cases in the U.S. so far are all just getting better, and only one has had to be hospitalized. Maybe, I suppose, people who catch the disease directly from an animal get a more serious case, whereas people who catch the disease from another human get a more mild case. But I have no real reason to believe that this is what’s happening. It’s just an idea.

Basically, this particular briefing is just too lame to be helpful, and it’s really annoying me that it’s typed in all caps, so I’m going to keep looking for a better source.