For now, sure, but we have no immunity to H1N1 and now that it's getting more and more widespread, who's to say it won't mutate into something that's more dangerous?
The flu virus mutates dramatically every thirty years. It also mutates slightly every year, and I don't think this strain will mutate into something dangerous any time soon.
Swine flu itself is not deadly. It IS the flu, just a mutated virus that's causing it. People are over-reacting about it being a 'pandemic' and how it's as bad as the Spanish flu. The Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918 killed between 50 to 100 million people in just over a year. This virus hasn't even infected that many people, and the people who died from it were old, unhealthy or immunodeficient. A perfectly healthy person shouldn't have to worry about the swine flu, though it causes some nasty symptoms. I myself have a suspected case, and it really is quite nasty, but nothing some medicine can't take care of.
In the end, it isn't something we should lock ourselves in our homes for. There are plenty of deadly diseases that are easier to catch than the swine flu, and you don't hear about them everyday. The normal flu causes the death of 4000 people every year in Australia, and these people are old or immunodeficient or have an underlying disease. So the swine flu shouldn't be such a worry for young, healthy people.
We have two confirmed cases at our school, and no one showed up the next day at school when the cases were announced. It's just fear of something we don't know much about. People are just scared because they heard on the news that a few hundred people died of the swine flu and that they might be next. I know people at my school who were perfectly healthy who went over to their local clinic and got themselves tested for the swine flu, and it was plainly obvious that they didn't have it.
Many of us are just scared about something we don't know about. We need to inform ourselves before taking uninformed decisions. This disease is a test of how we respond to a problem. Most of us took the word of the media and stayed home, thinking it was the right decision to make. The news channels said swine flu was 'potentially deadly', and half our school stayed home when one child was ill with it. This just shows how uninformed and reckless we are.
I'm a bit curious as to why all these animal diseases are suddenly mutating to affect humans. Within the past 50 years, HIV (most other animals had specified immunodeficiency viruses, but humans didn't get theirs until the '60s), avian flu (birds → humans), and swine flu (pigs → humans). Within the other few millenia of human history, there have barely been a handful of cases like this. For three separate incidences to happen so close together...
I know I'm a pretty paranoid guy, but this is some serious conspiracy theory fuel.
Actually, avian flu was the cause of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. Swine flu had existed since the late fifties, and some Muslim sheikhs think that HIV is a punishment from God. Either way, we're just gonna have to live with them.
About your paranoia...Someone in our class suggested that swine flu was created by the Americans to shift the news away from the financial crisis. Whether it's true or not, people are still worried about it.
