Word: influenza
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...drugs to help reduce the suffering, antibiotics to treat dangerous secondary infections like pneumonia, and real-time communications to spread the word. Soon we will almost certainly have a vaccine as well. We're living through an unprecedented opportunity for civilization - a chance to pre-empt a catastrophic pandemic influenza rather than just react...
...shortcuts come with certain predictable biases. In experiments, people reliably overestimate the chances of something happening if they can vividly imagine it. If we see something new, we try to fit it into a box that we understand - for example, a box labeled "Mild: The Same as Regular Influenza." Or maybe, more cinematically, "Plague Invading the Heartland," or perhaps another one called "Media Hype." All those boxes contain parts of the story. None is quite right. (See pictures of soccer in the time of swine...
...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...
...further confuse matters, influenza is inconsistent. It may lay siege to one town and leave the next untouched. That too perplexes the brain. We wonder why one school system shuts down and another stays open. We can't identify a pattern that makes sense...
...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...