Well considering that less than a dozen people (were officially confirmed to) have actually died from it, and all but one or two of them in Mexico, and even those were from Mexico, you probably don't have very much to worry about. If you wash your hands fairly often, don't stick them in your mouth, or rub your eyes with them, you have even less to worry about.

I'll probably have a blog up about this later full of all kinds of conspiracy-minded goodness.

Are the Jews trying to keep us down again? I hear they created the swine flu to keep the markets collapsed so they could continue to gain all America's wealth. I read it on the Internet so it must be true.

Well, I never really bought in to the whole Zionist Overlord theory, but, if you read it on the internet... I mean, they wouldn't put anything on the internet if it wasn't true right?

But yeah, the conspiracy wing of the internet has gone totally ape-poopy over this whole thing. Enough to be extremely entertaining (which has always been my favorite part of events like this). It's everything from piggy flu being an ethnicity-specific bio-weapon designed to kill Mexicans, to being a bio-weapon personally deployed by Obama himself at that big meeting of world leaders in Mexico city last week(ish). But fear not, the global banking elite get tied in there at some point too.

piggy flu being an ethnicity-specific bio-weapon designed to kill Mexicans

This was one of the first things I thought about when I heard about the swine flu. Like, in a sci-fi kinda way. Not that I actually think this strain is the result of an bio-weapon, but I wondered if we had the technology to do such a thing. Then, if we did, how would you do it? Would the swine flu target people with certain melanin levels, or what genome/gene/science-thingie would determine 'race'? Could it be used in other ways? Like, could you create a virus that only targeted people with autism?

...

Then a friend on Facebook pointed out that I was getting well within the city limits of Crazy Town, so I hopped onto a different train of thought and chugged on outta there.

Unfortunately, genetically-specific bio-weapons aren't science fiction anymore. The fact that we have the technology to tailor gene-specific medical treatments to a specific patient now should attest to that. But, from what I understand, it doesn't even have to be as complicated as isolating specific parts of an individual's DNA. It could just be engineering a virus or a bacteria to act in a way which a certain population wouldn't have a natural immunity for. Sort of like how some Europeans had immunities for Small Pox, Whooping Cough, etc. and Native Americans had none at all.

For instance, there is a small but significant percentage of the European/Middle Eastern/West Asian population which is immune from HIV/AIDS. This is apparently a direct result of surviving the Black Plague back in the middle ages. Both HIV and Plague need the presence of something called a T-receptor on a cell to invade it. Those people without that receptor had a natural immunity and survived the Plague, and therefore passed on that genetic trait, giving their descendants a natural immunity to other diseases of a similar pathology. So there you have a built in vector by which you can target one population and not another. After that it's just an engineering problem, and apparently not a very hard one either, as viruses and bacteria naturally want to mutate and recombine in novel configurations anyway as part of their survival mechanism.

So, basically, while it might not be the most likely scenario, it's hardly out of the realm of possibility.

No not all - I hate it when things gets overblown and people go into a total state. Thousands of people are kicking the bucket all over the world each day of all kinds of weird and wonderful diseases. In Africa, which is nit for sissies, the chances are good that I would have been murdered to death, stabbed, car-jacked, or maybe got fucking Ebola before the swines get to me (whether I washed my hands or not)

ha ha ha too true! It's ridiculous how overblown the coverage of this flu has gotten. It's sad, but the only reason I care is I don't want to take my statistics midterm so if someone could have swine flu and thus shut down my college, it would serve my needs quite well.

bahahah!! you crack me up suz! first, i definitely follow the "5 second rule" yet ironically HAVE to wash my hands a gazillion times a day, causing me to use endless amounts of lotion.