Swine Flu - Ten Tips for Me and You
Now that America has declared a state of swine flu public health emergency, you may be asking yourself - what am I supposed to do? Here is a list of ten practical steps you can take to prepare and protect yourself and your family.
1) Know the symptoms - Here are some of the symptoms that sound like swine flu - fevers over 100 degrees, body aches, cough, runny nose, and sometimes, nausea and diarrhea. It’s also useful to know if you might have had an exposure - either by recent travel to Mexico, or to the areas of known cases so far in America - California, Texas, New York, Ohio and Kansas. Or you may have been exposed to a sick person who came from those areas. The incubation time for swine flu is believed to be pretty short - 48-72 hours, and the virus seems to spread easily between people. If this sounds like your symptoms, then what do you do?
2) Don’t panic - If you have a cold or flu, and the media is full of details about a potentially lethal pandemic, it’s hard to not imagine the worst. Once the announcement of confirmed cases of swine flu at St. Francis Preparatory School in New York hit the news, local hospitals were swamped with concerned people.
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This link shows that although the flu is spreading... it's no cause for concern: www.swine-flu-map-animation.com/
I live in Mexico and in my State (Baja California Sur) there are not swine flu cases, we are free of the virus. We have seen in the news that the number of infections is arising but as far as I know the increasing in the number of infected people is not higher than the rate of infection of commun flu, so I don't see why we should be more concern about the swine flu that with any other kind of flu viruses.
Hi, Anon:
Thank you for your comment. The reason why there is such high concern over this strain of swine flu is that it's new and has spread to what the CDC (Center for Disease Control) considers pandemic.
Hope this helps.
I heard a programme on NPR yesterday and they were saying that it's actually less serious than the usual flu that many people contract each year.