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!