Perhaps the pestilence gods are with us!

Swine influenza, seasonality, and the northern hemisphere:

This history demonstrates the seasonality of pandemic influenza, and suggesta that spread of A/California/09/2009 in the northern hemisphere is not imminent. Based on this regularity, the epidemic in Mexico should be over no later than the end of May. While it is not 'impossible to see the current contagion spreading in the northern hemisphere over the following months', it would be unprecedented.

More like this

While I'm at it, here are a few other recent posts about modulating our thinking about the swine flu outbreak that is a) so far less horrid than our worst fears and b) still working its way around the globe, as it may well be doing for some time to come. Greg Laden notes that nothing has changed…
Influenza season is wrapping up here in the United States, and it seems so far that the 2006-7 season was pretty typical. The first cases of the disease were reported in late October, and cases were sporadic throughout November and early December. After increasing a bit in mid-late December of…
The spate of swine flu articles in The New England Journal of Medicine last week included an important "Perspective, The Signature Features of Influenza Pandemics — Implications for Policy," by Miller, Viboud, Baliska and Simonsen. These authors are familiar to flu watchers as experienced flu…
by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure The spate of swine flu articles in The New England Journal of Medicine last week included an important "Perspective, The Signature Features of Influenza Pandemics â Implications for Policy," by Miller, Viboud, Baliska and Simonsen. These authors are…

Heh, glad to see the experts agree w/me.

Let's keep an eye on the Southern hemisphere, esp. S. America. Mexico is in North America but there is lots travel between it and S. America.

Cuba is the first country to embargo travel to and from Mexico. The irony.

When I heard on a news show from a medical commissioner 36,000 THOUSAND people die yearly in the US from regular flu strains, a few hundred or more in Califoria or Texas and we've only had what? In a near month worldwide less than to quarter? How many by the hundreds are already dead by automobiles, bikes just walking running. The death toll is mostly from bad regional hygiene due to water and national customs and not having a society steeped in nonstop immunization and antibiotic cleaning items.

I'll be worried when something like a Spanish flu sweeps through the world cutting down a good 1-5 million which would be replaced in population births easily within a month by half of the regions in India and China let alone the rest of the world. Humanity is fine till a asteroid hits or the full high temperatures hit from global warming. Still and yet as long as there's more than half a mil of humans scrounging around somewhere on this dirtball, we ain't going extinct. Feh, it's just no one wants to be one of the ones biting the dust and not leaving progeny.