"Swine Flu" madness.

There is a new madness sweeping the world, "swine flu" madness, or H1N1 lunacy. Its symptoms are clear and focus around strange fears of infection. I shall explain.

Iraqi officials at Baghdad zoo have just killed three wild boars, in the strange belief that these boars, through being "swine" could somehow endanger people. So, too, and rather more drastically, Egypt has indicated that it intends to slaughter all 300,000 pigs in the nation, for fear of them harbouring swine flu. I wonder, at times, on hearing such news, whether I have suddenly slipped back to a pre-scientific middle ages and find myself surrounded by a superstitious world.

Let us get some things right: if an animal does not have a disease, it cannot give it to you. A virus does not magically appear out of nowhere - they don't spontaneously generate themselves inside a pig, simply because the virus was formerly called "swine" flu. The wild boars at Baghdad Zoo lived isolated lives with very little opportunity to pick up an infection. Only if one of their handlers became sick with the swine flu could they ever have caught it - yet they have been killed, simply for being "swine". The same goes for the Egyptian pigs. There hasn't been a hint of the new flu in any Egyptian pig - only if a human handler passed it to a pig, could one ever become infected (or an infected pig from outside Egypt was brought in). There is also no evidence, at all, of pigs transmitting this disease to humans, at this time. It is in fact not just a swine flu - but one that mixes swine, avian and human versions of influenza. The logic of the slaughterers seems to be based on the belief that the pigs harbour the virus, (when they don't)and so should be slaughtered to prevent them passing it on, yet, in fact, it is HUMANS who are harbouring the virus. So, applying this same logic to the true situation, would lead to the slaughter of all Egyptian people as a means to ensure that no Egyptian person succumbed to the disease. It is the logic of lunacy.

For me, one of the bigger surprises of this health crisis, is the way that modern countries appear to be acting irrationally. Slaughtering innocent, harmless animals is not the only lunacy. China and Russia, among other countries, have banned the import of pork. Yet, as I have noted, there is no evidence firstly that pigs are harbouring the disease, nor that they are transmitting it to humans. Anyway, humans don't eat raw pork - and if it is cooked, as it always would be, even if infected with scores of pathogens, it should be safe to eat.

It is customarily believed that Homo Sapiens is sapient, yet, at times like this, I seriously doubt it. Sapience, if a property of Mankind, is only a property of a minority of the species. The vast majority are, as nations all over the world are demonstrating, still quite capable of acting on irrational thought, even at the highest governmental level. Perhaps a greater threat to Mankind than pandemic flu, is the limited rationality possessed by so many of its leaders. It is their foolishness that should concern us, more than the H1N1 influenza A virus - for the virus will pass, but their foolishness will remain, at the helm of their nations. Now, that really is something to be scared of.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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