Y'dig?

Swine flu

The worst epidemic in history in the USA was the 1918 flu epidemic, which killed 675,000 people. The swine flu scare probably won’t kill that many, which, by the way, is just about the same number that die every year of cancer and car accidents combined.

And this total compares with 255,000 Americans killed in the whole of the Second World War.

(Sources: USA Today reports that in 2004 there were 553,888 cancer deaths in the USA. that’s 1517 people every day. Most of these deaths are avoidable if we only ate good, wholesome food and not the ghastly lethal junk sold in the average food store. According to http://www.car-accidents.com/ in 2005, there were 115 people killed every day in car accidents in the USA – that’s 41,975 in a year, the population of a small town.)

http://www.ydig.us/wp-content/uploads/images/roaddeath.jpg

Do we care about the carnage caused by cancer and road accidents, both totally preventable ? Not a lot. Why not? Because none of this is news, these 600,000 deaths a year are daily events. Of course we care if one of our own family in one of the statistics, but otherwise, we mostly don’t.

But we do get scared about ‘flesh eating bacteria’ of ‘West Nile Virus’ – even though there are very few fatalities, but these along with Swine flu make the national news.

So we care because the news media want us to buy what they are selling, which is news, not facts, not reality.

You might ask the question why is it, that the cancer deaths don’t result in news as to which items artificially added to our diet causes such cancers, and why they are added and by whom? Any one of these would make a nice news story, human interest and all that. Let’s take a look at the nice house and family that the people who cause such misery and suffering enjoy for themselves. But not a bit of it. Why not? I don’t know, is it because the firms that produce this lethal slop have advertising dollars to spend? Is it because prolonging shelf-life at the expense of human life, adds to the corporate bottom line at the expense of families deprived of their mothers and fathers? Is it because no one ever went broke giving the uniformed what they say they want?

But one thing’s for sure, we’ll be reading and watching a lot of stuff on Swine flu in the coming weeks and nothing at all on cancer and road deaths.

P.S. Had a picture of a cancerous mouth up on this posting, but took it off as it’s offputting, but no worse that what your imagination can envisage.