Tune to any one of the menagerie of network news outlets, and you’ll find one topic dominating the news crawl and the news desk: swine flu.

It’s all swine, all the time; same swine-time, same swine channel.

That the media is treating this issue like it’s the next Black Death isn’t all that surprising, as the press gets positively giddy over anything that might cause widespread panic.

Let’s get a few things straight. For starters, the swine flu is not new. The swine flu – named that because it carries a gene that pigs carry, nothing more – killed exactly one person in Fort Dix, N.J. in 1976. It’s terrible that someone died, but when you consider that hundreds more died from the vaccine that was supposed to inoculate people from getting the strain in the first place, it puts its severity into some perspective.

As of this writing, cases of swine flu have hit 10 states, 100 people infected in total, and one person has died from it. There’s little doubt that these numbers will rise, but I don’t see this becoming a full-scale pandemic (just as the avian flu didn’t reach pandemic proportions).

Now, even though people should not fear the swine flu more than the regular flu – something that millions of people get every year and over 35,000 die from annually, by the way – it’s still a disease, and worthy of taking precautions so as not to get infected by it.

After all, being sick sucks!

There are, of course, the obvious precautions that every person should be taking purely for the sake of good hygiene, like washing your hands after using the restroom, or washing them before and after being in public places, especially places where you’re touching what lots of people are touching (like the gym). But that’s just common sense.

As far as natural health precautions are concerned, you can’t do any better than natural antiviral to fight infection.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a recent press conference that all 50 states had access to stockpiles of the antiviral Tamiflu, which gained renewed attention after the bird flu scare a few years ago. But because viruses are quite adept in their ability to mutate, Tamiflu isn’t a sure-fire way to prevent infection. And they will be rendered useless if used willy-nilly and ineffectively (i.e. if they’re used long after a person’s been infected, the antiviral’s ability to fight the virus drops rapidly).

But that doesn’t appear to be the case for natural antivirals like Echinacea, golden seal and garlic. These and several other natural antivirals contain biochemicals that make viruses’ ability to mutate virtually impossible, as they prop up the immune system and ramp up white blood cell production.

These are supplements you should already be taking purely for the sake of keeping your immune system operating at it’s best, but if you’ve needed a reason to get yourself on these supplements, avoiding the flu (in this case, the swine flu) is as good a reason as any. As I previously alluded to, the swine flu is no more serious than the regular flu – the difference is that it’s foreign to most people and foreign things bring greater attention. But just because you shouldn’t work yourself into a tizzy over this swine snafu doesn’t mean you shouldn’t protect your immune system.

Consider this swine flu fling to be the just the thing you need to get your immune system armed with what it needs to protect itself from disease.

If that’s what winds up happening with this swine saturation in the media, then the panic that its engendered will have turned out to be a good thing.

>> Click Here for Swine Flu Part 2

Sources
jonbarron.org
turkishweekly.net
msnbc.msn.com
fumento.com