Saturday's Beach Class!! No Swine Flu here!!

Pandemic: (of a disease) prevalent throughout an entire country, continent, or the whole world; epidemic over a large area. 

As many of you know, President Obama has declared a state of emergency due to the pandemic of H1N1 or swine flu in this country.  According to Fox News, over 1,000 deaths have been reported in the U.S alone.  Let’s talk about this as your going to be reading and seeing a lot of this in the news.  1,000 people have died from this flu in this country.  Now, I can’t imagine the pain or heartache of losing a family member to the flu, especially a child.  However, before we get ourselves whipped into a country-wide frenzy over this “pandemic” let’s look at a few statistics:

Number of deaths for the 10 leading causes of death in the U.S.
(www.cdc.org)

• Heart disease: 631,636
• Cancer: 559,888
• Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 137,119
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,583
• Accidents (unintentional injuries): 121,599
• Diabetes: 72,449
• Alzheimer’s disease: 72,432
• Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,326
• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 45,344
• Septicemia: 34,234

 - Now, that’s a lot of people dying from some very preventable diseases.  No state of emergency has been declared regarding the Amercan diet, cigarette smoking, alcohol intake, or sedentary lifestyle.

• In 2008, an estimated 11,773 people died in drunk driving related crashes – per MADD (no state of emergency was declared, alcohol is still legal and readily available)

• Experts estimate that a staggering 98,000 people die from preventable medical errors each year. – www.greenchange.org (again, no state of emergency has been declared) 

My goal here is not to take away from the severity of pathological disease.  It exists and we should all be taking the necessary precautions to avoid it -such as washing our hands often throughout the day and increasing our intake of immune boosting foods, herbs and vitamins.  However, when are we going to see Fox covering the pandemic of horrible nutrition in this country, the pandemic of cigarette smoking that leads to so much heart disease or the pandemic of drunk driving?  Thoughts? Post to comments. 

Today’s Workout:
“Badger Revisited”
3 Rounds for Time of:
30 Squat Cleans (#95/#65)
30 Pull ups
800 M Run