Bush is the worst thing for this country since the 1918 Flu Pandemic

[MrScorpio]

And it could get worse any day

[MajorFlaw]

1. Which is worse: Flu

or plague?

[sharonking21]

2. Flu is worse in its potential in nature

Influenza is a virus that has a fairly rapid rate of mutation (meaning that every so often it can come up with a scary variation more abruptly than plague can). When it changes radically like this, most people currently living have no immunity to it.

Because it is a virus, it is more difficult to treat than plague--we do not have as much in our medication armentarium to treat virus's.

Also, flu is to a greater degree a truly non-direct-contact airborne microbe which can hang around in the air and dust and be inhaled later; it can also spread by direct contact with airborne droplets if you are within one meter of a person. It is efficiently transmitted from person to person.

Plague (the yersinia pestis bacillus) can be spread via airborne droplets if the patient has the pneumonic phase of it--gone to the lungs, but, more often the patient has bubonic plague, characterized by ugly blackish-purple buboes--(swollen, inflamed lymph glands in the groin area and under the arms that may eventually supparate).

This bubonic type of plague depends first upon having fleas who carry it from infected rodents or other animals to humans and it doesn't easily or usually spread from human to human. (First rule: don't kill the rodents before you get rid of the fleas. Otherwise they jump off and feast on you.)

If recognized early as plague (8-24 hours after symnptoms begin) both forms of it can be treated fairly successfully with common antibiotics. However, unless we are talking about a physician out in some desert area used to seeing an occasional case, recognition may not be that swift.

Oddly enough, in what might be thought of as somewhat counterintuitive characteristic, plague makes the better bioweapon. It can be targeted at a limited area, cause great panic, and yet still not spread into an uncontrollable worldwide conflagration, thus killing friends as well as enemies, as would the flu if used this way.

[MajorFlaw]

3. I'm sorry. I made a bad joke, using the "plague" metaphor to reference

our current occupant. My fault. Useful info though as it is a legitimate question.

:hi:

[sharonking21]

5. Oh that's okay

I was already operating in full epidemiologist mode when I saw this question, having, very late at night for me, just posted something about Marburg in Late Breaking News.

Will now put on political blogger hat and say that our current occupant of the White House is more like a pox upon all our houses.

[MajorFlaw]

6. "Pox" sounds like a reasonable compromise.

:toast:

[MontageOfFreedom]

4. Not really....

Even that epidemic would kill everybody in less than a year, with Bush you are never afforded even that luxury.

You are however forced to live through more than 4 years of it and endure.