A Disclaimer, and H1N1 and Your Lungs

Let's just be clear here, in case you have missed my entire life and have no clue how I live it...I won't make any apologies for posting and sharing prep-related things, or information that comes to my attention concerning swine flu. Same as I won't make apologies for posting what I do about my canning and preserving, my few homestead critters, my homeschooling, or my living in the sticks beyond the edge of the boonies. There's no point in emailing me about how you don't need to read all this "hyper-paranoid drivvel" as one emailer called it.

On my other blog, I was told all I know how to do is rock babies :o) Yep. That would be me. I don't know enough about anything in particular to share much with anyone else, but I know my family and I know what garbage is out there in form of both people and trash-talk and I have enough common sense to actively seek a much better way to do things.

If you aren't interested in helping yourself by being armed with information, I just know you will find a literal TON of fluffy blogs to visit and while away the hours with elsewhere. Shoot, I'll even help you find a better blog match for your temperment, interest and lifestyle if you'd like.

Honestly, if you aren't interested in homesteading, simple living, large family life, prepper/survival sort of topics and what might happen when the *stuff* hits the fan in this country, I don't know how on earth you ended up here at my blog at all. That's part of my life. All of it. Homeschooling, homesteading, being prepared for things to come, living a bit more back-to-basics than some, creating a self-sustaining homestead...if you are fluffy and light-in-the-head, have children in public school and love that, spend money on useless items that have no term life to them and don't believe for one minute that our greed and luxury lifestyle is coming to a very abrupt end in this country, there really isn't much here of interest for you.

Unless you just come around to poke fun and cause headaches with emails and comments.

Now, the latest from Reuters on the Swine Flu...I really don't understand how anyone reading even a tiny bit of what's out there about H1N1 and all the variants associated with it wouldn't be nervous about the upcoming start of school, the coming of traditional flu season...I just don't get it. If there is even a slight threat to the health of my family, I want to be informed as well as I can about it. I want to have a plan of action building in my mind and ready to go into practical application at the drop of a hat. I'd rather spend 5 months sitting on my homestead with nary a trip farther than the mailbox, holed up like a bear in his winter cave, than to take the chance that some idiot isn't running around town sicker than a dog sharing his germs with all in his wake.

Tn Preppers Network shared this latest article. Follow the links and read all of it, plus their links. At least man up enough to take care of your family by knowing what to do and when to do it. You are not likely to know if you have merely a run-of-the-mill standard flu, or if it is mutating rapidly into something that will place you on a ventilator for weeks, months, maybe even the rest of your life.

Excerpt:

Anyone who develops serious flu-like symptoms should seek immediate medical attention, because no one can predict when the H1N1 flu virus, or swine flu, will turn life-threatening in otherwise healthy people, infectious disease experts are warning.

Severe cases are occurring, in which the infection starts off like regular seasonal flu, with fever and cough, but then the lungs rapidly become inflamed and stop functioning.

"It looks to most of us like a primary viral pneumonia that deteriorates five or six days into therapy," says Dr. Allison McGeer, director of infection control at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital. "It's really severe illness."

"If you're young and healthy, you can recover from that severe lung injury. People do. But it takes a very long time," Dr. McGeer said.

"Sometimes we're talking about a month, five weeks on a ventilator before you are breathing on your own. Some people can be left with so much residual lung damage, they will have abnormal lungs for their lifetime."