Saturday, October 24, 2009

H1N1 is in the building!

My youngest son, aka Sweetness, has the H1N1 virus. It's the mild form, thank goodness, but he's been put on medication to ensure his lungs don't get a secondary infection because this virus is expecially hard on the respitory system.

I've been reading MUCH about this virus and the vaccination that's meant to be coming out in the next few weeks. If you're Canadian, and you can get your hands on the MacLeans magazine that came out this week, they tackle the topic with thorough, unbiased approach.

Then I came across this article from the Canadian Press that made me chuckle.
The full article is here: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/091022/world/us_cda_flu_vaccine
But this is the part that slayed me. It concerns the short fall of vaccine supplies in the U.S.:

Canada's abundant supply of H1N1, meantime, was noted with envy on Wednesday during a Congressional hearing into the swine flu crisis on Capitol Hill. Sen. Joe Lieberman told a Senate committee that the American shortfall of swine-flu vaccine is a result, in part, of countries like Canada choosing to make their own populations a priority. Ottawa pressured Canadian manufacturers to take care of the needs of the Canadian population before they could make vaccine available to the U.S., Lieberman said.
"It's exactly what we would do with an American producer, and it just puts an exclamation point on the importance of developing domestic capacity for production of vaccine in these cases," he said. "I'm not blaming Canada, but I suppose in some sense you could say that the ... shortage of the vaccine today, beneath what we would want it to be, is attributable to foreign countries telling their local manufacturers, 'Hey, you've got to fill our needs before you fill anybody else's."'
But one American who badly wants the vaccine - 29-year-old Katie Hentges of Jefferson City, Mo. - says the blame lies with U.S. officials who failed to anticipate the scope of the H1N1 crisis.
"I'm not miffed at all at Canada," said Hentges, an asthmatic who fears the flu could hit her hard if she catches it. "It's not their fault that Americans are short-sighted and have the dumbest health-care system on the planet."


Goodness -- I'm not even sure what to say about this, except: Senator Lieberman... REALLY?? LOL

Personal Message to M. - nothing mysterious about the raccoon... it made camp on my front porch last spring and it's cute and I have no book covers to advertise. That's it!

6 comments:

Rene said...

H1N1 is hitting my kids school. The kids I know that have had it are down about 2 days and then they are back to school. By the time the cultures come back confirming H1N1 the kids already back at school.

Every winter there is a panic because there isn't enough flu vaccine to go around. Not just swine flu, any flu. Its like deja vu all over again. You would think they would learn.

People around here have been able to get the H1N1 vaccine. California started gathering the vaccine months ago.

Thomma Lyn said...

Oh dear, I'm so sorry Sweetness has the flu. I hope he's all better very soon. Hugs and purrs!

Susan Helene Gottfried said...

Hang in there! I got the kids vaccinated last week, but am not sure that Asthma Girl here will get one -- my doctor doesn't think they'll get any in and I'm not standing in line for hours.

The only good thing is that since anyone ten years older than me is probably already immune, no one's going to yell at me for taking vaccines from the elderly, who need it more than someone as obviously healthy as myself.

Yep, people have said that to me about the regular flu shot. I'm glad they can see my lungs. :D

Julia Phillips Smith said...

I hope Sweetness feels like himself again soon.

This quote slays me:

'is attributable to foreign countries telling their local manufacturers, "Hey, you've got to fill our needs before you fill anybody else's."'

I'm filing that under Extreme WTFuckery.

M. said...

Two girlfriends of mine with six sons between them make an annual trip that takes six hours one way, so they switch the kids around in the cars to liven things up. On the way back one started feeling ill, and it turned out to be H1N1. None of the other 7 people exposed caught it, and he himself was back to normal in two days. It seems like very often, swine flu behaves like regular flu - can be dangerous to people with special medical needs, but no big deal for someone ordinarily healthy. I'm not getting my kids vaccinated because I don't trust vaccines developed in a rush - too many horror stories of other things going massively wrong.

Wylie - kind of disappointed not to look forward to were-racoons...

Realtor in Toronto said...

Well and entertainingly said. Yeah, some articles are just completely ridiculous. Who writes them? Anyway, I hope your son (and rest of the family) is ok. H1N1 really sucks.

Julie