Swine Flu Watch: Pandemics in Perspective
>>Too much knowledge can exaggerate the danger of a pandemic
The media, with their urge to simplify and to focus on immediate events, tend to aggregate raw numbers and to concentrate upon them as a measure of the seriousness and magnitude of the event being covered.
Thus we hear constant updates on the number of fatalities from multiple media platforms — newspapers, radio, 24-hour TV news channels that update every hour, websites and bloggers who range from the highly informed to those who are already linking the current events to sunspot activity or suggesting it’s an engineered virus released from germ warfare labs.
“Eighty-one dead in Mexico; U.S. declares emergency,” read one of the headlines Sunday. Yes, 81 dead in Mexico is something to grieve and is cause for public concern. Each one of those dead represents the anguish of a family. Yet, as the aphorism goes, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. It’s confusing the statistic for the tragedy that exaggerates fear.
We seldom hear daily updates on the numbers of those infected who have recovered, for example. Yet consider the much-cited Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. It’s common for commentary to cite infection rates and total associated fatalities.
It’s estimated that about 28 per cent of Canadians and Americans contracted the Spanish flu. Worldwide, an estimated 2.5 per cent of the sick died of complications, which made the pandemic one of the most lethal flu outbreaks in recorded history. Certainly it was one that imprinted itself upon human consciousness for several generations.
But there’s another way to look at those statistics. You might observe, for example, that they mean that even during the worst ravages of the 1918 flu, 97.5 per cent of those infected survived and recovered. Or that 72 per cent of the population — even in the absence of the sophisticated public health planning and infrastructure that Canada and the U.S. have since built — was not infected during the pandemic.
Full Article: here.
>>The quest for a swine flu vaccine
It is a global endeavour and will bring the public and the private together, but it could still take several months before a safe and effective jab is available.
Yet amid all this activity, the answer could in fact be right under our noses.
Tests are being carried out to establish whether the current seasonal flu vaccine could provide cross protection against what we are seeing at the moment, as there are similarities between the H1N1 human flu viruses and the new H1N1 swine flu.
Full Article: here.
Tags: news round-up, swine flu
