Intensive steroid use appears to cause serious kidney damage, it looks like, if you believe "doctors" and "case studies" and "the New York Times" rather than the T-Nation message boards.

Either way, steroids do give you beautiful breasts.

[Pic via]

The science is clear: a new meta-study shows that in places where smoking's banned in public places, heart disease and cardiovascular problems drop off noticeably and rapidly. Which makes sense! More suckily, the smokers among us—and the obese—are about to screwed, by the law:

By more than doubling the maximum penalties that companies can apply to employees who flunk medical evaluations, the legislation could put workers under intense financial pressure to lose weight, stop smoking or even lower their cholesterol.

Being a fat unhealthy smoker already means that you're probably a poor miserable bastard who's going to die young. Must we penalize America's poor miserable bastards even more? If so, start with this guy.
[Pic via]

The WSJ says that terrified religious types across the nation have given in to fear of the Satanic disease and are dispensing with the use of common communion cups. That's just what the pig flu wants you to do, people!

At a United Church of Christ congregation in the suburbs of Chicago, Communion servers now slice up bread into bite-sized bits before distributing Communion; they no longer offer congregants a loaf from which to tear a hunk of bread. In the interest of keeping fingers away from communion wine, communicants at All Saints' Chapel in Sewanee, Tenn., are now instructed not to dip their Eucharistic bread into the cup but rather to sip the cup directly, since hands are often more infectious than mouths.

Christ himself further suggests that "Maybe you guys can just gaze upon me from afar" until flu season is over.
[Pic via]

Yes, that Joel Stein, Time columnist, blowjob expert, and sworn enemy of Doree Shafrirs near and far, has had a disagreement with his wife over how best to medicate their child. See, there are people out there that think vaccinations are bad. Like Joel's wife:

Unlike Cassandra, I feel it's important to overload our child with toxic levels of chemicals, risking permanent damage to his nervous system. At least that's how she saw it.

Note the past-tense saw. Because, of course, over the course of this after-school special, Joel convinced Cassandra otherwise. Before then, unfunny Jew joke regarding trayf:

And I know almost no one who is willing to get the swine-flu shot, and not because everyone here is Jewish.

Zing! And The New Yorker!

It's freaked people out for more than a century, often for religious reasons, causing riots in England in the 1850s, a huge uprising in Brazil in 1904 and a polio-vaccine boycott in Nigeria in 2001. Such rebellions against vaccination typically lead to disease outbreaks that put unimmunized kids at elevated risk, and, unless someone does something to stop it, endless New Yorker stories.

...and then, tossing all of Cassandra's new-age-y friends under the bus, too, when Joel, the pragmatic, straight-man in this story, goes to deal with this, uh, long-haired hippie bullshit face to face:

I went to a seminar about inoculation at Cassandra's yoga center. Along with about 50 other people, we paid $30 each to listen to Dr. Lauren Feder. I was doing a pretty good job of distracting myself until Feder told us that a good case of whooping cough can protect your child from asthma, that measles cure eczema and that only 1% of the mere 15% of prevaccine kids who got polio became paralyzed. Feder really sees the good side of life-threatening diseases. I bet she believes Ebola cures wrinkles.

But Joel does get to one wonderful thing:

I asked...whether putting off the vaccine for hepatitis B until puberty was completely safe, or if a child could get the disease from being bitten by another kid. "You go with what feels right," Feder told me.

Yes: there's a doctor in L.A. telling patients—or rather, customers—to go with "what feels right" when vaccinating their kids. Not being a medical expert, I'm not entirely sure how safe or unsafe vaccinations are. But I do know: I was born, and my parents had me needled until I was everything but sterile, and I'm pretty sure I turned out fine (and probably: sterile).

Stein managed to talk his wife out of not getting the kid his shots—as long as they're low on aluminum?—so I guess we can thank him for throwing his wife under the vaccination tank and helping the Public Cause one day further. But this mostly just reminds me of what all parents say when their kids take the car out: it's not you we're worried about, it's the other drivers. Now normal parents in L.A. have legitimate reasons to be scared of the parents of non-normal, bougie parents in L.A.: not only because their children are possibly disease-carrying/spreading germ vessels that are simply mechanisms of their parents' well-intentioned destructive impulses in the name of being progressive, but because the sequel to Outbreak's been waiting to be made forever, and if there's anything more frightening than a disease-carrying monkey that could destroy civilization, it's a brat sprung from the loins of West Hollywood.

That means it should be possible to vaccinate - well before the flu's expected midwinter peak - all the 159 million people that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate are in the high-risk groups: pregnant women, people under 24 years old or caring for infants, people with high-risk medical conditions and health-care workers.

Whoa whoa whoa—I could have sworn that there are 300 million people in the USA. The socialist government is once again telling the Middle-Aged White Man to suck it! Fend for yourselves! Give the life-saving medicine to welfare people! NObama's not a pregnant woman but how much do you want to bet he gets some vaccine, hmm?

Even hogs are treated better than the Grown White Man these days. Outrageous.
[Pic: AP]

Here is what the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology officially consider a "possibility," this fall:

• 20%-40% of the US population develops swine flu.
• Two million Americans hospitalized.
• 300,000 in intensive care.
• 90,000 dead, from swine flu.

A tipster tells us this comes from an internal NGS memo, and refers to the Washington, DC office:

Possible H1N1 case at NG
Article posted by Karen Gilmour

Statement from [NGS Human Resources SVP] Tony Sabló
An NG staffer has come down with what may well be the Society's first
diagnosed case of the H1N1 virus, which has also been known as swine
flu. While the lab test results are still pending, the general wisdom
in medical circles these days is to treat any such set of symptoms as
if it is, in fact, H1N1.

The employee is now resting at home under a doctor's care and is
expected to make a full recovery. While members of the person's work
group have been contacted by our medical unit about precautions they
may take, we thought this would be a good time to remind everyone
about "best practices" to reduce the risk of contracting any and all
communicable diseases, including the flu.

Clearly, swine flu has become self-aware and is moving further and further up the intellectual food chain: it went from private schools to Conde Nast to the Washington Post to the National Geographic Society. Soon it will start systematically attacking institutions that really matter, such as the Sanitation Department.

This is only the beginning.

A major focus of planning for the fall, officials say, is to avoid being swamped by a similar, possibly bigger, demand for emergency room services. Some hospital officials are advocating putting out daily swine flu bulletins - modeled after announcements on alternate-side parking or lottery numbers - about issues like when to seek treatment.

The future of New York City's health is in Pat Kiernan's able hands. Or maybe the hands of whoever's on at midnight, if the government decides to put you on a mandatory night shift at your job:

The city is considering, in a worst case, measures like canceling big gatherings and staggering work hours, said Dr. Isaac B. Weisfuse, the city's deputy health commissioner for disease control, who has been studying the flu pandemic of 1918.

You first, Dr. Isaac B. Weisfuse.
[NYT. Pic: Getty]

Okay, so, by the numbers, New York has had 802 Swine Flu hospitalizations and 32 deaths "related to the disease." To their credit, the reporting the Post did was based on an actual CDC survey:

The new data is based on a community survey that found 6.9 percent of New Yorkers experienced a flu-like illness during a three-week period in May when the illness was at its most active. Researchers used a new type of modeling to extrapolate an estimate of how many city residents were likely infected with the new virus but didn't seek treatment.

So maybe we did and/or do! But what's a "flu-like" illness? Right now, when I talk I sound like Harvey Firestein's lost cousin and I have the sniffles. Also, I'm sweaty, but I sweat a lot, anyway. Do I have the flu-like symptoms? I'd also like to know what the questions were on this community survey. Ever since 7th Grade, when someone asks me if I'm sick, I'm like, yeah, definitely, I'm fuckin' dyin' here, but that's because it got me out of school.

Then again, maybe we all do have Swine Flu, and it's just sitting inside of us, incubating, waiting to kill everyone and anyone around at a moment's notice, a la The Stand. Scary, right? Or maybe we all just kissed people with colds. Either way: be vigilant! No more kissing.

500,000 NEW YORKERS MAY HAVE SWINE FLU VIRUS [NYP]

LA health officials disclosed last week that there have been 22 cases of HIV in the porn industry in the past five years, which is just vague enough to convince everyone that anyone could be a victim. Now, they're telling porn flick makers: if your actors say they're STD-free, don't believe them. Even if they have a doctor's note:

"If you do not see a name of a person you wish to shoot on the [test results database], don't use them, or at least call our office," said Sharon Mitchell, co-founder of the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, in a statement released Monday. She also said not to rely on paper certificates, "even if it looks like an original."

This would seem to imply a real risk that porn actors are forging clean test results, which actually is scary. [LAT]

UPDATE: As a counterpoint, check out this press release from the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, which says HIV testing in the porn industry is extremely thorough, and this AVN story, which analyzes exactly who those 22 positive tests were, and makes the case that the situation is far less dire than it sounds.

The long-awaited pandemic decision is scientific confirmation that a new flu virus has emerged and is quickly circling the globe. It will trigger drugmakers to speed up production of a swine flu vaccine and prompt governments to devote more money toward efforts to contain the virus...
The last pandemic - the Hong Kong flu of 1968 - killed about 1 million people. Ordinary flu kills about 250,000 to 500,000 people each year.

The good thing is that this is really a formality, and everyone's known for weeks now that this flu met the definition of a pandemic. The bad thing is that all it will take is one mutation of this virus that makes it truly deadly to set the world on a path towards another million deaths. And since the media cried wolf so loudly when the flu first hit, and it turned out to be not that bad, now if it does get bad, you can expect a ton of people to ignore the warnings.

We blame the media, whatever the outcome! Drink some orange juice!
[AP, NYT. Pic: Getty]

The NYC Health Department did a survey, which found the scariest lead ever:

The city Health Department says that more than a half-million residents of the Big Apple may have contracted swine flu.

But fewer than a thousand cases have been "confirmed," because so far officials have only tested Conde Nast employees.

The half-million bodies littering New York's streets justify the swine flu panic, retroactively!
[NYP. Pic: NYM]

Daily Intel (queen of the Conde Nast Influenza beat) reports that the swine flu has migrated from the lungs of livestock all the way into the offices of Glamour—which are strategically located next to an elevator bank, which could send the pig virus cascading through virtually any Conde Nast magazine at 4 Times Square.

Flee! And send us reports from inside, thx.
[Daily Intel. Pic of the gateway to death, via]

Daily Intel obtained this memo which just went out to Conde employees:

Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 11:56:41 -0400
To: Conde Nast NY - All
Conversation: Flu Advisory
Subject: Flu Advisory

We were recently notified by an employee working on the 12th floor at 4 Times Square [Ed.: WHERE VOGUE IS!!] that a doctor confirmed a positive test outcome for Influenza A (according to CDC, the H1N1 virus is a sub-type of Influenza A). This employee also confirms being under a doctor's care and currently recovering at home.

In line with CDC recommendations, please monitor any flu-like symptoms should they arise and check with your healthcare provider about any special care that may be required should you be pregnant or have a chronic health condition such as diabetes, heart disease, asthma, or emphysema.

This just might be the story of the month, already. If you are inside the infested area, please email us at once.
[Daily Intel]

Ever since the Great Swine Flu Panic of '09 started a month ago, the problem has been the same: it's not that swine flu was utterly undeserving of being reported upon; it's just that the DEADLY EPIDEMIC OMG aspect was incredibly overblown. Finally, interest has settled down to reasonable levels.

In California, the worst appears to be over. And in New York, these two deaths would have gotten wall-to-wall coverage a few weeks ago; now they're back in the metro section, where they belong. Factors contributing to the sudden outbreak of reasonableness:

• Turns out swine flu's no worse than regular flu!
• Everyone who's died in NYC so far has had other health problems, not just the swine flu
• Public schools are reopening faster than they're closing in PANIC.
• It's sinking in now that the PANIC is really a waste of time:

  Of those who have gone to the emergency room, fewer than 1 in 50 needed to be admitted to the hospital, Dr. Frieden said. "The vast majority of people going to the hospital emergency department probably shouldn't be going," Dr. Frieden said. Similarly, he said, a spot check of schools with high absenteeism showed that two-thirds of the children who were kept home were not sick.

[NYT, AP. Pic: Getty]

Folks all over America heard about this Deadly Swine Flu, on the teevee, and they're not waiting to be killed by runaway microbes: they're taking futile actions now.

More than 300 schools closed around the country, sending more than 170,000 students home in 11 states, including all schools in the Fort Worth district.

In Delaware, a rap concert was canceled. At Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, 22 students who had been student teaching in Mexico were told not to take part in graduation ceremonies. (Their separate ceremony will be shown on videotape, school officials said, during the official event.) And in Chicago, some Roman Catholic priests stopped giving communion wine and were asking parishioners to avoid shaking hands.

Anything that cancels a rap concert in Delaware can't be all bad.
[NYT. Pic via]

A 23-month-old child in Texas has died from the disease. And a five-year-old boy in La Gloria, Mexico—a town heavy into pig farming—was identified as the first case in Mexico. (Why publicly ID the kid and assure he's not only mocked at school, but besieged by foreign correspondents from around the world? I don't know).

According to the 1976 Swine Flu Panic Embarrassment Fiasco timeline, we're currently in the "feature story" stage of the national hysteria ('Meet the Family of the Victim!!!!'), to be followed shortly by the "cure proves to be worse than the disease" stage. Watch for it.

The head of the CDC "said he was saddened by the U.S. death, but added, 'I don't think it indicates any change in the strain.'" But don't be fooled, kids: the fun is fucking over. Get off the playground. Go to your room. Put on your mask. And wait.

No coming out until your parents are too weak to move.
[Pic: Getty]

This panic is following the script of the 1976 debacle to a tee! Today, Obama asked for the money:

President Barack Obama asked Congress for $1.5 billion to fight the fast-spreading disease.

Federal officials suggested the flu may be spreading so fast, there may be no practical way to contain it, and no need to tighten borders further.

So far, there have been no deaths from the fast-spreading virus in the United States.

If you think that the second two sentences make the first pointless, shut up! In 1976 the government only wasted $135 million (a little more than $500 mil in today's dollars). We're already winning! To help ensure that Congresspersons vote to authorize a blank check, Obama has a powerful ally: hysterical NYC parents.

"Many hundreds" of schoolchildren are sick with suspected cases of swine flu, said New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden.

We can only imagine what the Park Slope Parents messageboard looks like right now. Mayor Bloomberg just gave a news conference and pointed out that 2,000 New Yorkers die of the flu or pneumonia in an average year and it sure doesn't attract as many reporters as this, but who cares. He wasn't even wearing a mask! He may already be infected.

Panic faster! [Pic via]