It’s swine flu. Get over it.
Geesh. Yesterday, we heard the Israeli Health Minister proposing to rename swine flu. Today, it’s the Canadian Pork Council.
“It’s eroding consumer confidence in the Canadian pork industry even though we have no instances of swine having this influenza virus,” Stordy says. “People will not contract this influenza virus from eating pork.”
Stop it. Really. Stop blathering about the swine flu virus and pigs and pork and whatever. I don’t remember anyone trying to rename avian flu. Maybe chickens just don’t have a good PR guy?
According to the CDC, “the classical swine flu virus (an influenza type A H1N1 virus) was first isolated from a pig in 1930.” Thus the name which is much more descriptive than arbitrarily assigning a geographic identifier.
I don’t remember anyone trying to rename avian flu. Maybe chickens just don’t have a good PR guy?
Maybe they didn’t have to because when folks hear “avian”, they don’t automatically think “chicken”… Nobody ever called it the “chicken flu”…
Unbelievable that there are debates about the political correctness of a sickness name…..
According to this site, the Maldives is actually lobbying to “sponsor the name” to attract tourism:
http://tinyurl.com/maldivesflu