This is a reminder just how
misleading death rate reports are during the time of a medical crisis. People do slip away and are often
misdiagnosed anyway and when the normal death rate is dominating the numbers
anyway, it does not jump out at you that it is actually bad.
A disease like this can slide
into the population and be persuasive long before the numbers actually scream
for attention. Thus the paranoia of folks
working in this field is even necessary.
At least we have gone a while
without a real scare or better still we have not lost control of an epidemic
for a long time. AIDS is still not under
control globally as yet, but it is in the developed world. That was the last one and to be fair, it was
surely the toughest one ever in terms of wrestling it to the ground. Yet it has also driven cellular research in a
way that few other causes could.
Swine flu's shocking real toll: 265,000 more than anyone realized
WEDNESDAY 27 JUNE 2012
The swine flu pandemic of 2009 was responsible for the deaths of
thousands more people than originally thought, according to a new report
published yesterday.
A study conducted for The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal identified
284,500 victims around the world, more than 15 times the number of deaths
confirmed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) three years ago.
The original toll, a simple tabulation of laboratory-confirmed cases
that was thought to be a gross underestimation, counted around 18,500 deaths.
By extrapolating figures for poorer countries, scientists claim that the global
outbreak of the H1N1 influenza virus in 2009 could in fact be responsible for
as many as 579,000 deaths.
The Lancet study showed that the pandemic had a disproportionate effect
on poorer countries. Some 51 per cent of swine-flu deaths occurred in Africa
and South-east Asia .
Study leader Dr Fatimah Dawood, of the US
"One of the key findings is that this pandemic really affected
younger people than the typical flu season: 80 per cent of deaths were in
people less than 65 years of age. So an important way of thinking about the
pandemic is not just the number of lives lost, but the number of years of life
lost."
In stark contrast to outbreaks of seasonal flu, children and young
adults were the group most affected. The elderly, it is claimed, developed some
antibodies to the H1N1 strain in 1957, when a similar virus was prevalent. In
this instance however, 9.7 million years of life were lost compared with 2.8
million if swine flu had followed
The first confirmed case came in Mexico
in March 2009, and the first UK
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