Archive for the ‘Flu’ Category

Globalization indeed has made our world a smaller place. People from different places migrate to other countries in search of greener pastures. Along with the migration comes the highest possibility of carrying diseases as well. Take for example, aH1N1. It was known to us as “swine flu” and was declared a pandemic by World Health Organization on June 11, 2009. No one can actually say where the virus originated, though Wikipedia mentioned about virus isolation from patients in the US and found out that it’s actually made up from four genetic elements from four different flu viruses. So how come that in such a span of four months, 74 countries have been officially reported to have AH1N1 cases resulting to 4,735 casualties? The contamination is really fast because the virus travelled by air. They are among those passengers who devoured time zones, crossed international boundaries and travelled across seas by airplanes.

My curiosity has kicked again, this time about global warming and diseases. With all the alarming news on TV and on the internet, I think people over reacting to the scenario are merely acceptable. There was actually a journal released by World Health Organization saying that climate change will really have a big impact on communicable diseases. They mention about an increase in water born and respiratory diseases beside eye and skin diseases. There will also be problems with diarrhea especially for developing countries as well as heat stroke due to high temperature. In connection to this increased temperature, some places who didn’t have cases of Dengue fever will have a probability because high temperature is conducive to mosquito breeding. They also mentioned about increase rate of malaria and heat stroke. In this case, how can we protect ourselves? We have to take extra safety measures. I think the spread of diseases is also one of the effects of globalization.