"In the nine patients they studied who had caught swine flu during the pandemic, they found the infection had triggered the production of a wide range of antibodies that are only very rarely seen after seasonal flu infections or flu vaccination. Five antibodies isolated by the team could fight all the seasonal H1N1 flu strains from the last decade, the devastating 'Spanish flu' strain from 1918 which killed up to 50m people, plus a potentially deadly bird flu H5N1 strain. The researchers believe the 'extraordinarily' powerful antibodies were created as the body learned how to fight the new infection with swine flu using its old memory of how to fight off other flu viruses."

This reminds me of the time when I was in college when my friend Todd told me that smoking "a couple of cigarettes a day" was actually good for you because it was like "exercise for your lungs." (He had heard this from someone as he followed the Grateful Dead tour the previous summer.) It also seems a little bit like Ross Douthat's argument that racism and intolerance actually makes America a better country. Except that this is probably true? Y'know, like Kanye said. (That's an original Kanye quote, right?)

Thinking back, 2009 swine flu might have been the greatest global pandemic of all time!

Oh, also, Kanye's new song with Jay-Z came out today. It's called "H.A.M." Here it is, if you'd like to listen to it.

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I would rather not keep calling. That was my third or fourth or fifth inquiry about the swine-flu vaccine, by phone or in person at the office while getting other shots for the kid. This is not because I am a hysterical parent, unable to bear the thought of my child going without medical intervention. I do not snap awake at three in the morning with flu panic, worrying that some filthy stranger may cough around my precious offspring before he has been properly immunized, cursing the government for not coming up with vaccine fast enough, scheming to intercept the life-saving product before it goes to someone else's child. (Let the other child die.)

Instead, I keep forgetting about the whole thing. Then, after a couple of days, I remember, and I make myself call the pediatrician's office, and the pediatrician's office puts me on hold. And when I get off hold, they say they don't have it. Or one time they did have a batch, but they were only giving it out to kids between 3 and 5, or to kids who had heart conditions requiring surgery. The kid is only 2, and as far as we know his heart is fine. Keep calling back.

It would be much less work if I really were crazy. I try to be reasonable about health care for the kid: get him the normal shots, give him medicine when the doctor says to, and don't go looking for other stuff to get worried about. Now, though, through the wonders of the United States public-health system, the sensible thing turns out to be impractical. I really should get him a swine-flu shot; I really can't get him a swine-flu shot.

Either I force myself to act like an obsessed person or I ignore the whole swine-flu threat. I would love to ignore it. My inclination is to ignore it. At least I think that's my inclination, but it's hard to be sure. The kid was born nine weeks early, and that kind of skews my perspective. Among the routine, non-serious complications that came with it was that in the first few weeks in the hospital, he would sometimes forget to breathe, till an intensive-care nurse would tickle him and he would start up again. Very normal. His last week in the hospital, we slept in a room with him while he was hooked up to a blood-oxygen monitor. Eventually, after maybe the 20th time the machinery had beeped us out of sleep with a false or dubious warning-the baby rosy and oxygenated all the while-our annoyance became stronger than our fear, and we were ready to take him home.

And he was fine, and that would have been that, except he also developed asthma. Big deal, a lot of kids get asthma. Then just as we were moving back to the United States, last winter, he got a bad cold. I had learned not to worry about colds. Children are pretty tough. We took him to the pediatrician to be safe, so she could maybe prescribe him something if he really needed it. She checked his vital signs, blasted his lungs with an emergency dose of albuterol, and called an ambulance: respiratory distress and pneumonia.

So it's also possible, in this over-anxious world, to worry too little. I'm not the only person I know who has overlooked toddler pneumonia. I missed an ear infection for three days, too. The kid is in day care, where disease does flourish. The asthma really would make a flu infection more hazardous. I accept that he needs the vaccine.

But where is the vaccine? Weren't there supposed to be jackbooted public-heath officials ordering everyone to line up for shots? I am all in favor of forcible vaccination; anti-vaccine activists are degenerate idiots who deserve to get polio and live out their days in iron lungs while Child Protective Services takes away their children to be properly raised. Or tetanus. Get lockjaw and shut up and die. What's the point of living in 21st-century America if not to avoid dying of stupid, easily preventable disease? You just like listening to Miley Cyrus?

When I try to be a responsible member of the immunological herd, I get nowhere. While I was writing this, it occurred to me that the kid still also needs to get a shot for the regular, non-swine, non-sensational influenza. That gave me an extra excuse-no, an extra reason-to be calling the doctor, again. The H1N1 was still unavailable, still with no known delivery date. The regular flu shot? Also out of stock. Call back in a week.

Previously: Stroller-Bullying on the Red Line

Tom Scocca prefers to write for money, should you have some. Ask him yourself!

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I've obviously over-thought this. Besides being the new new thing, swine flu, I think, has got people talking because of what the words that comprise it evoke. Which is to say, pigs. Now, pigs are filthy, at least Biblically speaking. And because I kind of agree with those punk Norwegians and think that whatever international conversation Barack got going last November is one worth having, let's say also that pigs are filthy Koran-ically speaking. And right there, we have two of the big three, believing that pigs are filthy. But bacon aside, aren't our Jewish friends and our Muslim friends onto something? Come on. Pigs slop around in their own slop. If a strain of the flu virus slops around with them, well that's just fucking gross. Right?

Which leaves us now with the whole swine thing. Calling it pig flu would be, like I just said, fucking gross enough. But the word swine adds a Germanic flavor to the visual. When I hear swine, I think Herta Mueller and her fellow extras from The Reader. Plus, I think of the stuff that The Reader was about (Nazi guards having sex with kids) and the stuff that The Reader alluded to, but didn't really show (murdering people whose religion tells them pigs are filthy). Last week when I was coughing a fit before boarding my flight, I received many suspicious glares, and I thought of Herta and her friends clogging, with their phlegm-y joylessness and their furtive eyes.

This is of course not to equate having the flu with ethnic literature, ethnic cleansing or ethnic dancing. When I hear swine flu, I imagine Nazi Germany and Nobel Literature prize winners, and to a lesser extent, Nobel Peace prize winners (apparently). When you think of the disease, you may visualize farms and Amish people, and that bizarre year away the Amish teens do where they drink Natty Light and eat Applebee's and vandalize stuff. Maybe you think of that pork belly everyone, but especially Tom, trips over on Top Chef. Or maybe you just think of Tom Colicchio. We all, I think, have our free association stuff: what we think of when we hear or read different words. And isn't that the power of language in a very "Reading Rainbow" sort of way? To take us somewhere else?

Words elicit emotional responses and paint pictures. Which takes me back, like most things, to 10th grade. I remember Father Zanoni prancing around our desks, reciting from memory to us, William Wordsworth's Daffodils. Father Zanoni was a Jesuit and a dandy, and thus required us to memorize and recite poetry. If we whined that we didn't want to, he explained why memorizing stuff was useful and civilized, but then held up cue cards in the back of the room if we stumbled. With Zanoni, the hypocrisies of high school were at least acknowledged, so when he described the flowers, "beside the lake, beneath the trees/ fluttering and dancing in the breeze," we listened. He was our favorite teacher that year.

More to the point, Father Zanoni taught us about the Romantics. That is, how they used imagery, and how revolutionary it was to use language the way they did-evocatively, visually. Is swine flu romantic? Check it. Only the word "swine" separates swine flu from flu flu. In fact, from what I understand, there are bigger differences between bacterial flu and viral flu than between swine flu and flu flu. And yet, swine flu is Adam Lambert (and I don't just mean composed of living and non-living material) and the flu flu is, I guess, some American Idol contestant we don't give a shit about. Words! Such power! Just imagine if we found another word for "healthcare," one that made people imagine "everyone, even poor people." Instead, the word we use now makes some people visualize Kenyans cheering.

But you don't have to take my word for it. Check out your local library for these and other people who talk to themselves.

Luke Mazur, one of our two correspondents on English language usage, is back living with his parents, AND he feels sick, if you can believe that.

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