Oink oink.

Run for your lives. Get as much food and guns as you can and get the fuck out of the cities. The swine 'flu apocalypse is nearly upon us, and it could be worse than a terrorist attack according to health experts... er... according to doctors... ahm... according to a police officer..

A police officer. Riiiiiggght.

So if in the increasingly unlikely event I go back to that North Atlantic island asylum anytime soon and am unfortunate enough to be robbed should I go report it at the fucking Accident & Emergency department of the nearest hospital? Or what?

Superintendent Steve Anderson from West Midlands Police said officers could be forced to stop non-emergency work in a worse case scenario.

Oh really? No shit! I can see why they made you a fucking Superintendent. Someone promote Steve Anderson to ACPO's Department of the Blindingly Fucking Obvious, quick. Nothing gets past him. Do you know what, Steve? I'm prepared to bet that with the exception of the sort of retarded twunts who dial 999 because they've lost a biro most people would guess that non-emergency police work stops when something like that happens. When the July 7th bombs went off I reckon the overwhelming majority in London, and probably in Britain generally, would expect the police would be a bit on the busy side. Apart from the biro fuckwits of course.

Oh never mind, carry on Doctor Plod, do (my bold)

"We have this thing called a community risk register, which is in effect a who's who list of scary things that could happen in the community," He told Channel 4 News.
"And we've assessed each of those based on actually how likely it is to happen, and the impact on communities – and even as bad as terrorism, as bad as heatwave, as bad as flooding can get, a worse case scenario is that pandemic flu would be worse than any of those."

Fucking hell, the whole place has gone mad, though I'll have to give bonus panic points to Supt Anderson for working in the terrorism Horseman as well as what might be an oblique reference to global warming. I can't imagine how he could have worked paedos and organized crime, but I think he missed a golden opportunity to mention that swine 'flu could kill more people than drugs*.

Back in your box Steve. Go arrest someone while we listen to a medico instead.

On Thursday Prof Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, told the NHS to plan for the possibility of up to 65,000 deaths from the disease this winter...

Oh for fuck's sake. Face, allow me to introduce palm. Palm, this is face.

Prof. Donaldson, as pointed out here, is the twat who came up with the concept of passive drinking and wants to ban smoking outdoors - well, even more of the outdoors considering it's already banned on outdoor railway platforms** and bus shelters. I have a vague feeling he may have mentioned tertiary smoking as well, though it could be another health nazi, and I have little doubt that passive obesity has only made it to the back burner because of the bloody pig 'flu. Or perhaps because Prof. Donaldson is a bit of a fat knacker himself. He might be better off working on passive wanking making other people go blind, because the sight of him knocking one out would probably make me rip out my own eyes and jump up and down on them.

But in fairness to Prof. Donaldson there's a bit of media "if it bleeds, it leads" scare story paper selling going on. The quote above reads in full (my bold):

On Thursday Prof Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, told the NHS to plan for the possibility of up to 65,000 deaths from the disease this winter – although he said as few as 19,000 could occur.

But of course the headlines in The Telegraph and other papers are tending to stress on the 65,000 number. And it gets worse, because further reading suggests that Donaldson has pulled these numbers out of his arse.

Sir Liam insisted that the figures for the number of deaths were not “predictions” but worst case scenarios that the health service should plan to deal with.
He said: “We haven’t had enough cases to even give ballpark figures of estimates.”

Credit where it's due, he doesn't really know and he's being honest and professional enough to say so. So it would be honest and professional of the media to stress this point - that it's all fucking guesswork and estimates - rather than talking about tens of thousands dead and vastly more sick. It's usually in the articles somewhere but Jesus you have to go digging through to find it. On the strength of what he's actually said even the "as few as 19,000" figure could be out by a factor of ten in either direction.

They. Don't. Fucking. Know. Yet. Got that?

Come back to me when the streets of London are empty and it looks like a scene from 28 Days Later. Until then I'm not going to worry.

UPDATE: Swine Flu Catches Cherie Blair.

Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: "The Cherie virus will attach itself to the swine flu and suck at it like a big, patronising leech that thinks it's better than you.

"Viewed through a microscope the early form of the the mutant CherSwine virus looks like a spiky ball of pus with the mouth of Ronald McDonald.

"And after just ten minutes on the Petri dish it leapt into my wallet and started pocketing all the fivers."

Bwaahaahahahahaahahahaahahahahahaa.

* Funnily enough I was only making a remark about the Horsemen of the Infocalypse riding in on sick pigs over at Sue's, who deserves a big tip of the bush hat for her post on Donaldson and the whole 65,000 figure.
** That's reminded me of one of the best examples of British idiocy I've ever seen. Years ago, before the smoking ban obviously, you used to be able to smoke at Wimbledon station on platforms 5 and up but not on platforms 1 to 4, even though 1-4 were just as outdoors as all the rest. In fact platform 5 was (presumably still is) only the width of a couple of trains away from platform 4. The reason for this? Because platforms 1-4 ran London Underground District Line services and smoking had been banned on the whole Tube network in response to the 1987 King's Cross fire. The reason was to avoid the risk of another disastrous underground fire, but Wimbledon Tube station, like about two thirds of the London "Underground" is on the surface, and it's hard to see what good it achieved when people at Wimbledon could puff away within twenty feet.