We're not even in flu season yet, and already hospitals are overloaded. I have to wonder how many cities are ready for this:

BALTIMORE — To Mitchell Goldstein, the flood of sick children seemed endless. Day after day, nearly three times as many kids as usual streamed into the rainbow-colored pediatric emergency room at Johns Hopkins Hospital, sniffling and feverish, worried parents hovering.

The press of children with swine flu was so relentless that doctors opened an annex in a hospital dining room to handle the overflow. "Our worst day" was Sunday, Oct. 11, says Goldstein, one of the ER doctors. "We had 15 to 20 patients an hour. It was 24/7. There wasn't a lull."

Last week, the epidemic of ailing children let up somewhat. But doctors here are expecting a new run of flu patients — the children's parents. "What we see first in (children) we see two to three weeks later in adults," says Trish Perl, the hospital's director of infection control.

The scenes at Johns Hopkins are being repeated at hospitals in Denver and Duluth, Seattle and San Diego, as waves of flu patients arrive at their doors, doubling their emergency room volume. Just as significant is the effect on intensive care units: A relatively small number of flu patients are requiring intensive care, but some are so ill they will need round-the-clock care for weeks.

Doctors at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere expect the number of patients needing hospitalization and intensive care to rise. Such an influx of intensive care patients eventually could force some hospitals to cancel services such as elective surgery, they say.

"Why did President Obama declare a national emergency? Because what's going on at Hopkins is happening across the country," Perl says. "An infection that generally doesn't appear to be severe is pushing hospitals to their limit."

The White House declaration, announced Saturday, was designed to give hospitals the flexibility to move patients to satellite facilities if they are overwhelmed in dealing with an outbreak that is now widespread in 46 states and afflicting millions of people, says Reid Cherlin, an administration spokesman.

"H1N1 is moving rapidly, as expected," Cherlin says. "By the time regions or health care systems recognize they are becoming overburdened, they need to implement disaster plans quickly."

[...] To many analysts, swine flu appears to be two overlapping epidemics: one a cascade of mild to moderate cases that is stressing hospital emergency rooms, and the second a narrow stream of unusually young patients who need intensive care.

[...] Connie Price, chief of infectious diseases at Denver Health, the city's public hospital, says, "I've been living this" since Aug. 28, when the hospital's lab reported 12 positive tests for swine flu.

"Since then we've been inundated," she says. "In a typical flu season, we may hospitalize 15 patients. With H1N1, we've hospitalized 10 times that many. We're not even in flu season yet."

On November 3rd, there will be a Constitutional Amendment on the ballot in Ohio. This is no ordinary ballot initiative. Its very existence and marketing has been bought and paid for --to the tune of millions--by national and international agri-business corporations, such as Pioneer Hi-Bred International (owned by DuPont, a "developer and supplier of advanced plant genetics"--healthy!--and grantee of 100K to the effort),the National Pork Producers Council (113K), and the United Egg Producers (200K!).

(Join our Facebook Group and help us stop this travesty!)

Now why, you ask, would these Big Agra players get involved in a state issue, and to support a campaign that is for touchy feely things like "food safety" and "local control?" I'm not sure, but it might be that this corruption of Ohio's Constitution will provide "food safety" much like George W. Bush provided "healthy forests," "clear skies" and a "mission accomplished." In other words--and I know this will shock you--they're lying. And they're lying with millions of dollars they've acquired, by being, like their "products," pigs at a trough.

So what is Issue 2, what will it do, and why should you care about it if you're not a resident of the Buckeye State? It's simple: Issue 2 was put on the ballot overnight by state legislators bought off by Big Agri-Business and their mouthpiece here, the Ohio Farm Bureau. Why? So that they can corrupt Ohio's Constitution to give the Governor the power to appoint a board of unaccountable agri-business cronies to make decisions in smoke-filled rooms about all farming practices in Ohio.

I know what you're thinking. Unaccountable, corporate-influenced governing has worked out so well with TARP money and preemptive war, we might as well try it with farm policy.

With Issue 2's passage, those only interested in their bottom line can (and you can bet will) stuff millions more animals into smaller and smaller crates together, increasing the likelhood of H1N1 and E. Coli outbreaks and mutations and their capacity for animal cruelty. They can ignore the waste caused by big factory farms that contaminates the water we drink. They can allow workers to be exploited and placed in situations that endanger their health, while putting family farms--held for generations--out of business.

And why should you care if this passes in Ohio? For all the reasons above, but also...because you're next. This amendment was a reaction to successful efforts to rein in their greedy, dangerous and abusive practices in California (Prop 2), Arizona and Florida, among others. If they can use the camouflage of bought off Democratic and Republican Establishments, millions of dollars in lies, and an off-year low-turnout election to enshrine their corporate malpractice into state constitutions, they can fly under the radar while endangering our health, undermining the people's right to petition (another amendment would be needed to overturn it if passed, as the new board's decisions would supersede ballot initiatives, legislative decisions and opinions by the State Department of Agriculture) and spiking their profits.

How can you help? Well, we only have 10% of their budget. But we have the grassroots energy. We have you.

So please join our Facebook group. Tweet this. Blog it. Call and email everyone you know in Ohio. And be prepared when this garbage dressed up as a gift inevitably makes its way to your state.

(Watch this video for more on this - the 1st minute and then from 5:22 on)

Full Disclosure: I am proud to be a consultant in the effort to beat back Issue 2 in Ohio

Either you get a mild case - or it almost kills you, and they still don't know why:

Swine flu is mild for most people, but some become so gravely ill that they require sophisticated techniques, equipment, and aggressive treatment in intensive-care units to survive, according to three new studies.

"This is the most severely ill that we've ever seen people," said Anand Kumar, lead author of one of the studies and ICU attending physician for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority in Canada. "There's almost two diseases. Patients are either mildly ill or critically ill and require aggressive ICU care. There isn't that much of a middle ground."

Some of the patients Dr. Kumar and his colleagues saw were so sick they had to be saved with a technology similar to one used for patients undergoing heart bypass.

The studies of critically ill patients in Canada, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand, published online Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest that intensive-care units could be stretched as a second wave of H1N1 swine flu builds in Northern Hemisphere countries such as the U.S.

American public-health and hospital officials have expressed concern that the country's intensive-care facilities may not be up to accommodating the swell of patients they could potentially end up with in large-scale outbreaks.

An advisory panel to President Barack Obama warned in August of one scenario in which as many as 300,000 patients could require intensive care, occupying between half and all of ICU beds in affected regions at the peak of infection. Such a scenario "could place enormous stress on ICU units, which normally operate close to capacity," the panel warned in a widely publicized report, which also said as many as 90,000 people could die of the disease.

The patients analyzed in the three JAMA studies deteriorated very rapidly after entering the hospital, quickly progressing to respiratory failure, shock, and organ dysfunction and failure. They spent prolonged periods on mechanical ventilators, and some required frequent "rescue therapies," or treatment to save them from life-threatening conditions.

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If this mutates into a more virulent flu, we're in trouble - because we just don't have enough ventilators to treat a major pandemic:

A new government study shows that one quarter of Americans who were sick enough to be hospitalized with swine flu last spring wound up needing intensive care, and 7% of them died.

Health experts say that is a little higher than with ordinary seasonal flu. They say the biggest difference is that nearly half of those hospitalized with the new swine flu have been children and teens. Flu usually strikes hardest in the elderly.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did the study, with local and state health departments. Results were published online Thursday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers identified 272 patients hospitalized for at least a day from April through mid-June, when the novel virus caused its first wave of cases. That's about one-fourth of the total hospitalizations for swine flu reported during that time, but researchers only studied lab-confirmed cases and patients who agreed to be part of the study.

Three-fourths of these patients had other health problems, such as diabetes — typical of seasonal flu, too. However, only 5% were 65 and older; ordinary seasonal flu usually hits hardest in the elderly.

We're already seeing problems in other countries:

Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Swine flu drove a 15-fold increase in intensive care admissions for viral lung inflammation in Australia and New Zealand, especially among pregnant women, the obese and people with chronic lung disease, a study found.

During the peak of severe illness, patients with the new H1N1 influenza strain filled 8.9 percent to 19 percent of all intensive-care hospital beds in each state of Australia and New Zealand, according to the study published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Almost 65 percent of intensive-care H1N1 patients required mechanical ventilation.

The Southern Hemisphere’s winter flu season, studied from June 1 to Aug. 31, may give health officials in the Northern Hemisphere an indication of what to expect in coming months, the researchers said yesterday. The pandemic filled all available beds in some units and prompted doctors to postpone nonessential surgery, New Zealand’s health ministry said in July.