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Europe, America, China respond to the flu
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From Kevin Miller, of the University of Michigan, an observation on why the differing European, American, and Chinese approaches to the current spread of flu might be explained by the respective health threats the areas face:
I have a colleague, a native German, who went to Germany last week and reported that the general attitude was that Americans were being crazily hysterical about this. It makes sense to me that a) the Chinese are really being hysterical, b) Germans are calm, and c) we're somewhere in between.
If you look at the medical safety net in each country, this makes perfect sense (plus the big worry that this could combine with bird flu, which they have in China. H1N1 seems to be easy to catch but rarely serious; bird flu is hard to catch but often fatal; flu viruses seem good at swapping DNA within host nuclei. If the same person had both bird flu and H1N1, this could lead to something really bad).
