When Pigs Fly

Posted by gspeed on May 11, 2009 in Animalia | 1 comment

So pig flu isn’t really bird flu in disguise, but rather a Frankenstein version of the flu virus that’s made up of a some bird flu, a few pieces of human flu and a couple chunks from the pig flu genome. The porcine (piggy) parts of the virus are tested to determine how susceptible we are to getting sick from it…so that’s why the name ‘pig flu’ trumps anything else.

Israelis arn’t happy with the name, though. It does make sense for people to get upset at having caught “swine flu” when they’ve spent their whole lives avoiding anything to do with pork (even poor, defenseless, little, bacons…so sad).

Nobody really knows where the virus came from, but most people theorize that the pig flu’s birthplace was at a farm somewhere…inside a pig that was probably friendly with some chickens and people. Now we have a virus to worry about.

But the good news is that if you’re older, you’ll probably be OK. It’s us (ahem…) young’uns that seem to be getting sick. I guess living indoors and not exposing ourselves to enough dirt and fresh air…and various forms of the flu… has made us susceptible to getting sick from the newer version. Blame HBO.

News of pig flu has been blown out of proportion and kept us glued to the TV screens and away from the germ riddled schools and parks. The irony is that the people who DON’T get sick are the ones who have exposed themselves to all kinds of crap over the years, but now we are all too scared to go out. Not only that, but regular flu (the one that some of us avoid those christmas vaccinations for) generally kills a lot more people per week than the pig flu does.

Fortunately swine flu has nothing to do with eating pork…unless someone with pig flu coughs on your bacon.