^ Not to what you have eaten. We usually don't tend to eat raw pork and that virus is destroyed at 70? Celsius. But even if one did happen to eat a raw pig infested with the swine flu (very likely
:) the virus would not be taken up through the alimentary system, it works only through inhalation.
as far as I've heard, people in different areas of the world are more immune to the disease
I'm kind of wondering about that one and now I'm switching from current events to history. Much of the human immune system is based on our living circumstances. When in 16th century the Europeans arrived in the new world they unwittingly brought along uncountable diseases which caused far more deaths than any fighting between "whites" and Native Americans ever did (we are talking of a mass dying that by percentage of victims in the population may have been much worse than for example the "black death" that killed of a third of Europes population in 14th century). When the Europeans arrived in the new world the "exchange" of epidemics was (with very few exceptions) a one way street though. Europeans hardly got any epidemics from the Native Americans to which they had not been exposed before. It is a likely assumption that one of the reasons was that throughout the centuries (and at the cost of many lives to various plagues) the immune system of most Europeans had been confronted with far more diseases than was the case with the Native Americans. One of the reasons was that Europeans had for thousands of years domesticated all kinds of animals (cows, pigs, goats, horses, sheep etc.) and been living in very close contact with these animals and carriers of disease. Apart from some dogs (not known as a main carrier of disease) and lamas there had been hardly any domestication of animals on the part of the Native Americans which could have "prepared" there immune system to all the diseases brought along by the Europeans.
Nowadays however few of us will be exposed to domesticated animals in the way people were in the middle ages or the early modern times and I daresay none of us will live under as unhygienic conditions
As a consequence much less people die from diseases nowadays, but I wonder if at the same time our natural immune system is suffering from the lack of "training" caused by the improved hygienic conditions. Some scientists state that living in too sanitary conditions and showering every day (sometimes even repeatedly on one day) will in the long run increase our dependency on synthetic vaccines which have to some degree replaced the "natural training" of our immune system.
This training has partly been replaced by vaccination but through the faster development of vaccines the viruses adapt to the new vaccines faster as well. It is like some kind of ever accelerating race between the two.
