Please, please, PLEASE Don't take the author's advice of trying to catch H1N1!!! I realize that comment was tongue-in-cheek, but still... There are a lot of people who do believe that they'll be better off catching it, and this is only likely to make things worse.
well, since most of us get flu at least once every couple of years, it's kind of hard to avoid H1N1, the most popular form of influenza going around. Of course, if we were to catch the very specific form of H1N1 with the genetic coding that matches the swine flu epidemic, that'd be worse.
It's worth remembering that in almost all cases, it's not the flu that kills you - it's the onset pneumonia, diarrhea and dehydration that takes you down. The best survivalist method is to remind yourself how to treat cold/flu symptoms, stock up on meds, and sweat it out. Helps if your health insurance is up to date too. :)
True, many will become infected naturally. The problem is that the antigenic shift of influenza is affected by transmission rate. That is, the more times a virus gets passed from person to person, the more it can mutate. The vaccines that are developed are based on a "normal" rate of antigenic shift. If large groups of people try to get infected, there is a risk that they will throw off this rate.
