Word: flu
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...sort and compartmentalize all the information about swine flu will probably determine whether you take it seriously, ignore it or begin freebasing hand sanitizer to get through the day. As with all viruses, influenza's only function is to replicate itself. It makes you sneeze so it can infect a new host and reproduce. When it encounters resistance, it changes. For the brain, this is maddening: How do we capture a threat that routinely escapes from one box and reappears in another...
...this strain of H1N1 has proved blessedly mild. So far, at least, many people get it; not many die. But mild is a tricky word. "Mild, when you're talking about flu, can still be dangerous," says Michael Shaw, a microbiologist at the CDC who has been working with influenza for 30 years. "It may be mild in the majority of cases, but the more cases you have, the more chances you have of infecting someone for whom it will not be mild. There are lots of kids with asthma...
...They feel fine. They go to work and take care of their kids. They don't define themselves day to day as someone with asthma," says Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. (Read about how pork is getting a swine flu bailout...
...also think they are less likely than others to get divorced, have heart disease or get fired. Likewise, according to a late-August poll by CNN/Opinion Research Corp., more than 60% of Americans surveyed said they were not worried about themselves or anyone else in their family getting swine flu...
...June the CDC organized 15 focus groups in three cities to discuss the public's impressions of the new flu so far. The participants had all heard of the virus, but they had a lot of questions. In an Atlanta group, the organizers had people read a news story about a real-life, healthy teenage girl from Milwaukee who had caught H1N1 in the spring and died. The group reacted with intense discomfort and then did what humans do: they looked for a way to fit it into one of the boxes in their mind. Some speculated that the girl...