The first thing to make clear is that this is not a "secret biological weapon" cooked up by the CIA to kill off the people of the third world (a la "The Stand" by Stephen King). I knew when I first heard the news reports that the kook websites would be abuzz with this sort of nonsense.
Since the JFK assassination and especially Watergate, conspiracy theories have become a new sort of secular religion. People believe all sorts of crazy things, confusing coincidence, corruption and incompetence for shadowy secret conspiracies. AIDs was not "created in a lab" (recent studies show it may be as old as the 1880's: History of the HIV Virus ). Likewise, this latest flu is a natural mutation.
It could have happened like this: Mexico is a very popular tourist destination, especially in the winter months. Aircraft visit there from all over the world, loaded with passengers who have spent hours breathing recycled air in the cabin. Those passengers likely came from Europe, Asia, America and elsewhere -- or were on other flights with people who were. It's easy to imagine several different flu viruses exchanging genetic material, using some unfortunate holiday maker as a host. Then, when he or she deplaned in Mexico City, the newly mutated virus could begin to spread -- facilitated by the fact that, as a new species (or subspecies), human immune systems would be at a loss to fight it off.
This is a lot more plausible explanation than: Somewhere, in a secret government lab, some evil scientist is brewing up a super flu bug to kill off half the world's population. For one thing, how would this scientist (or evil secret government employing him) be certain not to infect their own family members? Even if they develop a vaccine, it would not be 100% effective. Do you really expect us to believe even "evil" people would do that? If nothing else, they'd be endangering themselves; surely they care about self-preservation and that of their own families. Any disease as easily spread as the flu would make a useless weapon, just as chemical weapons were found to be in World War I. The fact is, such weapons end up killing too many of your own side, even when precautions are taken.
As for killing off just the people of the third world: There just isn't enough genetic difference among humans to reliably engineer a virus to kill one nationality or race and spare another. It would be like trying to develop a virus that just kills black cats.
Also, on the subject of the First World War, it's now known that the outbreak of what was then called the "Spanish Flu" is what actually ended that prolonged bloody conflict. Too many soldiers were dying of the disease (on both sides) and it left too few to fight. Are we to believe that the Spanish flu was cooked up in a lab? (Surely even the most delusional conspiracy theorist knows that gene splicing was unknown at the time.) The Spanish flu of the early twentieth century killed mostly young victims, whose strong immune systems caused their lungs to fill with fluid and left them unable to breathe. Older people often survived, since their weaker immune systems did not over-react.
Now, on to the Mysterious Blue Man! What has he to do with all of this? Well, a common feature of all the conspiracy websites are ads for quack cures. Most just help you by making your wallet lighter (and thus easier to carry). But "collodial silver" can be dangerous. It is a potion made from the metal silver, dissolved in water. One man in California has drunk so much of the stuff he has actually turned blue.
Is that Poppa Smurf?
This poor man will have to go through life looking like death warmed over ... or maybe an alien, or something. It's all because he used a quack cure that was abandoned by medical science more than half a century ago, precisely because of this bizarre side effect.
Once again, I bring this to your attention because colloidal silver is so commonly hawked as a panacea on so many of the popular kook conspiracy websites that decry "big pharma" and it's "conspiracy to poison you" or whatever. Of late, it's been touted as a cure for the newest outbreak of the flu. Looks to me like this unfortunate fellow is a victim of a conspiracy to not only take his money for a fake cure-all, but he's suffering very visible harm as a result. One can only guess what damage was done to his internal organs -- not just his skin -- from ingesting this stuff.
Here's a link to Quack Watch, a very good website dedicated to exposing such things; this is an article on collodial silver (it'll open in a new window, so when you close it, you'll be back here):
Another problem, especially in America, is the poor quality of the public educational system. Religious zealots have managed to cripple schools by forcing them to avoid teaching basic biological science -- in particular evolution. This being the case, it's no wonder that people can be hoodwinked into believing all sorts of crap about the flu being cooked up in a lab, instead of evolving on it's own, since they are taught in their churches (and by tacit approval) in their schools that evolution doesn't exist. Ignorance leads to suffering, and Americans are ignorant.
China and India are poised to become the two new global superpowers in this century. Their school systems are not hampered by hand-wringing over whether scientific facts that contradict religious myths can be taught in the classroom. They go ahead and teach the facts! America is falling further and further behind the rest of the world, principally because of it's stubborn, blind adherence to Christian fundamentalism and it's ugly, dim-witted child -- creationism.
Dragging you kicking and screaming out of the darkness of religious superstition into the light of science and reason ...
Until next time,
I am AtheiX
