Swine flu: Kill the noise. It's making you sick
| Saturday, May 02 2009 05:24 PM
Last Updated Saturday, May 02 2009 05:24 PM
People, people, please. Calm dowwwwn! If you're reading this from anywhere within the borders of Kern County, I can tell you with near certainty that you are far, far, FAR more likely to die from being overweight and out of shape than any kind of flu, swine or otherwise.
So stop crowding into emergency rooms and quit bugging your doctors to get swine flu tests or prescriptions so you can stockpile flu drugs. All you're doing is running down supplies and clogging up an intricate testing system.
Oh, and you might want to turn your television dials to something other than hyped-to-the-max-24-hour cable news shows. Get out and go for a walk instead. That would have the two-fold benefit of maintaining your sanity and helping you avoid Kern's real health menace -- heart disease.
If that doesn't help, here are some common sense things to remember about swine flu: 1) As of Friday afternoon, there was not one single documented case in Kern County and B) even if the swino virus does eventually affect a few people here, it's a mild flu. Repeat: MILD flu.
Since this whole thing started I've been appalled by the breathless reaction to an illness that's not life-threatening, particularly here in the United States.
Maybe the hysteria is amplified because Mexico, the epicenter, is in our backyard as opposed to China where avian flu and SARS originated. Or maybe we're so freaked out because of the 1976 swine flu episode, which resulted in a vaccine that turned out to be more dangerous than the actual virus.
Either way, this outbreak has really brought alarmists to full shrill.
State Sen. Dean Florez even started calling it a pandemic before health agencies used the P-word, which unnecessarily scares the jeepers out of people.
Please note that "pandemic" doesn't mean "we're all going to DIE!!!!"
Pandemic means widespread. Cases of skin cancer among people who spend too much time in the sun without protection are pandemic.
Even the word "epidemic" doesn't mean "we're all going to DIE!!!"
It means rapidly spreading. Twittering has become epidemic, particularly among people who like to pass on bad information about swine flu.
So, to recap, a mild flu that is widespread could spread even further.
"This is a time for awareness, not alarm," Kern County Public Health Director John Nilon told me.
If you wake up tomorrow with the sniffles and a headache, stay home from work. (Even in run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks, it really chaps my hide when people come to work sick. Like I want their crud!)
If the sniffles progress to a high fever with other flu-like symptoms, call your doctor and discuss it first before you rush in for a nose swab.
Doctor Raj Patel told me his office has received a lot of phone calls from concerned patients, but neither he nor his partner have found any whose symptoms qualified for testing. He's also received calls from people wanting prescriptions for tamiflu or relenza "just in case."
"Those need to be reserved for patients who really need it," he said.
Besides, they're expensive, have short shelf lives and if not administered at the right time and in the right manner can make you even sicker than the flu.
"Don't stockpile," Patel sternly warned.
For those of you getting tested "just because," here's the fallout you're causing:
There's a checklist that needs to be filled out. If not fully completed, the lab has to backtrack through your doctor, then the lab screens the list to see if you're a priority case.
To be a priority case, first off, you have to have flu symptoms. Sniffles don't cut it. Then they want to know if you've returned from Mexico in the last seven days and become ill. And so on.
If you meet those criteria, they send it on the Kern County Public Health, which does a further priority screening. Then it's sent up to Tulare County, which screens the list again.
If it makes it through all those cuts, the sample gets tested in Tulare and if it turns up as a "probable" case (meaning it's some kind of influenza), they send it on to the Centers for Disease Control to confirm whether the virus is genetically the "swine" strain.
Results from Tulare come back fairly quickly, but the final verdict from CDC can take several days.
Up to Friday afternoon, Public Health had received about 250 samples over the course of the week and sent a little more than 60 up to Tulare. None were even probable cases.
Clearly, the more frivolous samples submitted, the more time, money and effort is wasted.
"We're trying to get through this early period of high volume, which is really pushing our search capacity," said Michael Lancaster, the lab director for Public Health.
Once swine flu is found here, he said, testing will slow down.
"Once it's established in the county there's no advantage to finding it more often," he said.
Besides, the treatment is pretty much the same for regular old flu -- bed rest, liquids and time.
Prevention is pretty old school too: wash your hands, cover your mouth...and if you're sick, STAY HOME.
Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com
