Public Health Emergency

I seem to have gotten out of America just in time. Though the Swine Flu or H1N1 Flu as it now being referred to has seemed to have stabilized and is not the serious menace it is being hyped to be in the media, airline flights are beiing cancelled and travellers coming to Europe from the western hemisphere are being scruitnized intensely.
I don't want to underplay the concern that the World Health Organization is giving to a potential menace. A virus, which once took months and years to travel on this planet is now aided by the miracle of international jet travel. An airplanew becomes a vector or transmission.
The governments seem for the most part to be responding in a responsible and reassuring manner, while the media is behaving like a pack of hysterical lunatics, treating the virus the same way irresponsible way it treats every political and celebrity story; like a flash riot.
The conservative media in America has been given another legnth of rope to hang itself with as it goes full hog into an orgy of anti hispanic racist rhetoric.
What comes across most to me after a few weeks in America: People are afraid of health issues. They are being used as pawns by the insurance and drug corporations.
The idea of a system of assisted preventative health care is being touted as a step to socialism and socialism is being touted as anti American and a mere hop skip and jump to full blown communism.
To me, America is already in the grip of an epidemic. An epidemic that could be prevented and treated. I was horrifically amazed at the explossion of obesity that seems to be incrementally growing every time I go to the USA.
This epidemic is tragic because it also on a par with addiction. The addiction to highly refined foods, laden with sugar , starch and fat, packaged as snacks and fast food is as dangerous if not more so than heroin.
Heroin is illegal, but multinational corporations constantly bombard consumers with advertising and new product.
Can we define addiction?

1. Compulsive physiological and psychological need for a habit-forming substance: a drug used in the treatment of heroin addiction.
2. An instance of this: a person with multiple chemical addictions.
3. The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or or involved in something.

Now, have you ever spoken to an obese person about their habits, or if you, yourself consider your self obese, is this familiar?
First, the denial of a problem and evasion in dealing with it. Second, trying to deal with it is the cause of real physical discomfort. If a person addicted to over eating tries to stops they actually do experience many real forms of discomfort.
Obesity is a cause of the rising incidence of diabetes in populations that have up to now not been genetically disposed to it. It causes more heart attacks and cancer than smoking every did. That is just the tip of the mountain of health complications that arise from obesity.
Overweight people are less prone to exercise and are more prone to physical injuries.

I understand that obesity in many cases is caused by problems other than just over eating, but the epidemic that is destroying a large portion of America is preventable and like any other form of addiciton, in many cases requires outside intervention.

It is really tragic that the biggest epidemic in America is an addiction that is enabled by the biggest multinational corporations on the planet...And tragically, it is a fact that the present H1N1 flu virus has been traced by scientists this week to a virus identified in 1998 originating on American pork industry factory farms.

On Wednesday, Columbia University biomedical imformaticist Raul Rabadan comfirmed that six of the genes in the H1N1 Virus were definitely descended from the H1N2 and H3N2 swine viruses isolated in America in 1998. At the time, scientists identified the industrial pig farming techniques as incubators for the virus and warned of the potential for mutation and the possible leap from specie to specie.