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A La Carte (4/30)
- 04/30/10
- 12
How Will My Son Be Saved? - I think I’m pretty much linking to everything Greg writes at his Wrestling with an Angel blog. What can I say? I find it all so good. In the latest post he wrestles with how his severely disabled son will be saved.
Lessons from H1N1 - TIME goes looking for lessons from the H1N1 panic of last year. Their response seems to tend toward the politically correct. Nevertheless, it’s worth reading. “Yet catastrophe never came, and the total U.S. death toll from H1N1 — about 13,000 people over the past year — was considerably smaller than the 36,000 people who are estimated to die each year from the regular, seasonal flu. Millions of doses of H1N1 vaccine expired unused on doctors’ shelves, and health officials are now under fire for over-hyping what seemed like a harmless bug. So, was H1N1 much ado about nothing?”
The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education - Seth Godin pens a good article on education. “For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing. I’m afraid that’s about to crash and burn.”
Reflections on Leading at T4G - Bob Kauflin reflects on leading 7,000 people in worship at the recent Together for the Gospel conference.
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I worship and serve as a pastor at 
Releasing on April 1, The Next
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This review of the bestselling
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Comments (12)
Re H1N1, it appears that it was a scam, a scare put to the WHO by the manufacturers of the drug (Roche and others)… Being the political organization that they are, they warned every country about the coming “pandemic”.
It was a cash-grab plain-and-simple; the media (of course) lapped it up. In Toronto, everywhere you saw ads from “experts” or commercials from respected medical professionals admonishing us not to wait - get the shot right away.
Very disingenuous, but nary a word about it.
As someone who had H1N1 as did my wife and son. Of the three of us my wife still has a lingering cough from it and likely had a-typical pneumonia. My bout with H1N1 turned into pneumonia that had me off work for more than a month. The only one who just had the flu was our 4 year old son. I would have taken a vaccine if it was available before I got the flu, which it was not, rather than go through this. Normally for us the flu means a week of illness, not months. Were we hospitalized for it, no. Did we die, obviously not, but we were very sick for a very long time. I would not call that hype as I have encountered quite a few people in the same situation and they will not show up in the epidemiological data because the only people tested for H1N1 are those who ended up in the hospital. Of course, based on the number of people vaccinated, could we not just as well say this was an example of a successful vaccination campaign that resulted in a widespread immunity that prevented unhindered transmission?
It’s one thing to say that it was overhyped, but it’s ridiculous to say it was a non-existent scare hyped up to sell vaccines. Our local schools did not have a 20-30% absenteeism rate in some weeks outside the normal flu season, with the school nurses having to send several kids home each day, because of something that didn’t exist. And please don’t tell me kids develop 102 fevers psychosomatically because of what they hear on the news. If Toronto was spared, consider yourself blessed. Don’t close your eyes to the people who were affected.
Our local schools did not have a 20-30% absenteeism rate in some weeks outside the normal flu season, with the school nurses having to send several kids home each day, because of something that didn’t exist.
In Paul’s defense, I think a lot of that absenteeism was a product of the hype, not the illness itself. Some parents were over-reacted, taking a sniffle as H1N1 while others were holding their kids out of school, worried that they’d be exposed.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the flu was not real. Of course it was real, but it was completely capitalized on - and not with the purest intent.
Drug companies (publicly traded) saw this is a prime opportunity to sell their vaccines.
It has been called a “Campaign of Panic” piloted by drug companies.
Watch this 3 min video for example:http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=hoQN1to3C2U&feature=related
H1N1 blew through southern Ohio in a two-week period in October 2009, with plenty of confirmation that it was the real thing. Schools had rates of absenteeism as high as 60 percent.
My son ran a fever for six days, but was only truly knocked down for a day. I got it, too, and also experienced one very bad day (though I dragged for almost five days afterward), but I would have to say in both our cases, H1N1 proved less incapacitating than seasonal flu.
Observations:
* H1N1 did hit many young, healthy people I know harder than seasonal flu, though the opposite was also true.
* It did kill teenagers and adults in their early 20s in our area. The local newspaper wrote a sad story about a couple who lost both their children, a teen son and 20-ish daughter, to H1N1, both children healthy before the flu struck.
* Older people did retain some immunity from a similar epidemic that struck in the 1950s.
* My neighbor does epidemiology for the neighboring county. The feedback on H1N1 he gave me (and we talked daily), was sort of all over the map. But the one thing that was universally true was that H1N1 was far more communicable than seasonal flu. Other than that, it was tough to make any generalizations about it.
In reference to the Higher Education article, I think there are several features missing in his assessment. Colleges still have several avenues to provide value. Their libraries are still repositories of a lot of information that you just can’t get on the web or without spending thousands in books. Being a student of vertebrate paleontology, I can tell you this is a real issue for some fields (now, if you want to debate with me whether these fields are relevant…). There is also the matter of discernment. It takes time to learn how to tell good science from junk science. Even if your professors are skewing the definitions of ‘good’ towards their own work, and are wrong, you eventually get a standard whereby you can judge anyone’s work, including theirs. But then again, I’m on the academic track so I might not be the best person to ask.
Thank you for introducing me to the “Wrestling with an Angel” blog. It has been such a blessing to read Greg’s posts about his life with his son. His insights are amazing and insightful. He is quickly ascending my list of theological heroes. I love this quote from the post you linked…” I have poured over God’s promises like a doctor searching for a cure of the deadly disease in his own child”. Wow!!
Yes, there was H1N1 hype. The media is going to do that to sell papers (or whatever it is that they sell these days).
But, it was (and remains… it will be back this autumn) a major problem. A lot of people died. If various national and international health organizations had not prepared and then mobilized, things might have been a lot worse.
Of course, a skeptic could always say, “well, they might not have been much worse at all.”
True. But how do you know that. All that we saw was a novel disease that seemed to have a rather high mortality and morbidity rate associated with it. And it was spreading fast.
If the various powers-that-be had just said, “oh, don’t worry, you’ll all be OK,” and then something catastrophic happened, the tenor in the hindsight-is-20/20 media reports and in blog comments like these would be much different. Instead, we’d be hearing about government ineptness and (from the truther/birther/tea party lot, plus their lefty anti-vaccine yuppie suburbian allies) that it was a UN conspiracy to reduce the world population. Or something along those lines.
I am sure that the vaccine programs saved numerous lives. Even if it didn’t (which is highly unlikely), at very least, it taught the world how to respond to a dangerous new epidemic. The lessons learned will be implemented again some day, perhaps in the face of a much more dangerous threat.
There is some hype about H1N1 vaccine causing sterilization. Something to do with those who think there are too many people in the world. What do you know about this?
I’m no expert, but I find it a pretty big stretch to believe that a single shot can cause sterility in both men and women. Conspiracy theories should at least be plausible. ;-)
When the “panic” regarding H1N1 was at its worst, the emergency and intensive care units of the major medical centers in my area were stretched to capacity. Otherwise healthy individuals in my church became gravely ill; some are still recovering, but at least one died after an agonizing battle for life. Please don’t call it hype because things weren’t as bad as they could have been for as many people as were feared. It’s terribly insensitive to those who suffered.