2. EXERCISES FOR DISCUSSION
2.1 EXPRESS YOUR OPINION:
- I strongly believe all borders should close when there are flu pandemics.
- I strongly believe closing borders is useless.
2.2 HEALTH PROBLEMS: How do you deal with health problems? State your remedy or cure and your experiences:
- flu
- headache / migraine
- toothache
- stress
- sleeplessness
- stomach ache
2.3 PREVENTION: Rank these things in order of which is best to stop swine flu from spreading:
- close the borders
- educate people on TV / the Web
- have a hand-washing campaign
- kill all pigs
- everyone wears a mask
- ban pork products
- have a flu jab (injection)
- stay at home until it´s over
2.4 SWINE FLU DISCUSSION: Here are some questions you can try asking yourself before you come to our discussion on Wednesday:
a. What did you think when you read the headline?
b. Did you llike reading this article?
c. What springs to mind when you hear the word 'flu'?
d. What do you know about swine flu?
e. Why do you think this disease has never been seen before?
f. How worried are you that swine flu might spread to your area?
g. Do you think swine flu will become a pandemic?
h. How do health organizations prepare for a pandemic?
i. Why do you think it´s difficult to predict the seriousness of this disease?
j. What´s your country doing about swine flu?
k. Do you think countries should close their borders?
l. What do you remember about recent outbreaks such as bird flu and SARS?
m. What do you think authorities should do at airports?
n. How might swine flu affect the world´s economy?
o. Would you cancel your travel plans?
p. What do people need to do to be ready for a possible outbreak?
q. What would you do if swine flu hit your town?
PREPARING A DISCUSSION IS FUNDAMENTAL:
THIS MUST BE DONE IN TWO DIRECTIONS:
FIRST, YOU NEED TO LEARN NEW VOCABULARY AND EXPRESSIONS THAT YOU WILL HAVE TO USE FOR THE DISCUSSION.
SECONDLY, YOU HAVE TO PREPARE THE TOPIC BY LOOKING UP INFORMATION IN THE INTERNET, BOOKS, ENCYCLOPAEDIAS.
THIS WAY YOU WILL FEEL MUCH MORE CONFIDENT AND AT THE SAME TIME YOU WILL HAVE MUCH MORE TO TALK ABOUT.
FINAL TASK:
HERE IS ONE FINAL TASK THAT YOU MAY DO AND THIS WAY YOU WILL COVER THE FOUR SKILLS YOU MUST IMPROVE WHEN LEARNING A LANGUAGE: LISTENING, READING, SPEAKING AND WRITING.
Write a composition and leave it in the blog as a comment to Session 15, I will edit it in the blog so that everybody can learn from other people´s opinions.
Express your opinion on one of the following topics:
- Does the pharmaceutical industry benefit from pandemics such as the Swine Flu and how.
- How strong are the pharmaceutical companies in the World Economy considering that stocks and shares of these companies have increased considerably with the Swine Flu.
Sometimes, when I watch TV advertisement, it comes to my mind those western films in which a talkative charlatan tried to sell a magic potion which healed all the diseases.
ReplyDeleteNowadays it is very usual to find many products that have a special chemical substance with a strange name (L. Casei, plant sterols, omega-3, etc.) and will easily solve every problem that we have.
In a way, capitalism is based on creating a necessity and then companies, as they were superheroes, give us the solution. Probably, health and fear are both, two weak points where those companies can get their aims and one example of this is what happened with fly flu and it can be repeated with swine flu.
As you can see, wealth and health are not very different words although they are shared out in a not very fair way.
Two different points of view of a problem.
ReplyDeleteSwine flu is a global problem that has so many different sides. Politics, Health, Relation between countries, and of course Economy, that is affected from different aspects.
I want to express my opinion about two of them. First of all, we can deal with the health situation, paying especial attention to the fact of nacionality of the mayority of mortal victims. A big percentage of them were from Mexico, specifically from its countryside. However people affected in Europe or developed Nations, are just passing some days in a hospital and coming back home taking some medicines. Then we can wonder if this flu is very different to the another sort of flu we suffer every fall.
From another side, we can speculate about who is earning money with this disease. Pharmaceutical companies prepare big amounts of products that have a expiry date , so they can sell them before these dates.. In fact we could read that a big amount of antiviral products will be useless in 2010. We can check how lucky these companies have been, selling them just in these months, in order to fight against Swine flu. Experts from pharmaceutical world are saying that they need at least, three or four months to get a vaccine against the desease, time enough to sell their surpluses of antiviral.
I hope you don’t unserstand that I am accusing pharmaceutical companies to create the desease, I am just saying that they are so lucky.
Perhaps a good measure could be nationalize medicine just in case of pandemic, especially in places like Africa, Asia and third world.
By Eduardo Jesús García Rojas.
In my opinion, the pharmaceutical industry is always trying to benefit of everything they do, obviously, because that’s its real objective. If the question is if it is always ethic, then we would have different opinions as regards of it.
ReplyDeleteThat kind of industry should play an important part in our society, although they seem to forget it. It looks as if they become blind while they are collecting money and they couldn’t see its social part in the game.
Pharmaceutical industry is necessary, they have means and resources to avoid people suffering hardship or the death. That’s the reason for believing that they must reach their economical objectives, but they have to respect people and not to do at the cost of his health.
To conclude, what I really think about this matter is that people’s health and life had to be above all and it can’t change for money or other dubious and unknown interests.
The pandemic situations are good for companies related to the health care industry: pharmaceutical, biotechnological, chemical, hygienic products and so on. This kind of crisis raises the stock quote of this kind of industry. It’s so logical: there will be an increase of the demand for the products and services they offer. Perhaps the question should be in other place, pointing to another side of the field: are the vaccines really effective against the influenza viruses? Maybe the labs are selling “smoke”. Here we’ve got a saying (I don’t know if there is a translation for in!): “muddy river, wealth for fishermen”. In the end, if we look for help, they (the pharmaceutical lobby) are the first to ask for. Sure they’re going to have a huge workload.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the main problem is to avoid a panic attack that affects the whole world, which can cause more pain and indirect unwanted problems than the virus disease. If we’ve got someone looking for a solution, we’ll stay at home reassured, better than if we don’t have it.