UPDATED! Is H1N1 - "Swine Flu" - really the pandemic the media says?

According to two recent stories on FoxNews, H1N1 deaths in the U.S. have passed 1,000, with 95 of them children. Everybody is screaming

PANDEMIC!!!!!

and descending into panic attacks.

However, if you look at the statistics from the World Health Organization (and admittedly, these stats' most recent information is from July), you'll see that worldwide deaths total only 177,000. OK, let's be pessimistic and say that worldwide deaths have tripled since July - that would bring the grand total of worldwide deaths to 531,000.

Let's put this in perspective.

Here are the top ten causes of death in the United States:

• Heart disease: 631,636
• Cancer: 559,888
• Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 137,119
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,583
• Accidents (unintentional injuries): 121,599
• Diabetes: 72,449
• Alzheimer's disease: 72,432
• Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,326
• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 45,344
• Septicemia: 34,234

The rough total for all ten is 1,854,400, and the leading cause of death in the United States alone - heart disease (ONE CAUSE) - is about 1.2 times higher then the hypothetical WORLDWIDE death rate for this flu.

Folks, I'm not saying not to take precautions. I'm not encouraging you to stop washing your hands or to let sick kids go to school and infect everyone else. I'm not telling you to refuse the vaccine shots and I'm not telling you to get them, either - that's your choice to make after you've evaluated the facts as they apply to you and your family.

But can we just quit with the hyperbolic scare tactics? I swear, y'all are crying "WOLF!" and when the wolf really does come to our door, everyone will be so jaded by previous hysteria that they'll throw the door wide open, and then we'll see some serious death rates.

So let's be sensible, OK? Be safe, be smart, but will you all please just take a chill pill???

UPDATE: My good friend David points out an article from CBS (!!) on 21 Oct., which says

If you've been diagnosed "probable" or "presumed" 2009 H1N1 or "swine flu" in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu.

In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all. That's according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation.

The ramifications of this finding are important. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Britain's National Health Service, once you have H1N1 flu, you're immune from future outbreaks of the same virus. Those who think they've had H1N1 flu -- but haven't -- might mistakenly presume they're immune. As a result, they might skip taking a vaccine that could help them, and expose themselves to others with H1N1 flu under the mistaken belief they won't catch it. Parents might not keep sick children home from school, mistakenly believing they've already had H1N1 flu.

Why the uncertainty about who has and who hasn't had H1N1 flu?

In late July, the CDC abruptly advised states to stop testing for H1N1 flu, and stopped counting individual cases. The rationale given for the CDC guidance to forego testing and tracking individual cases was: why waste resources testing for H1N1 flu when the government has already confirmed there's an epidemic?

As lovely a case of circular reasoning as I've ever seen....

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Comments

[Shaun Kenney]

1.

Just got done with our bout of swine flu. Meh... I've seen/had worse.

[David]

2.

I was _DOWN_ last week with either the worst cold I've ever had or some sort of flu--had most of the signs of flu, not cold, but a few that were more symptomatic of cold; really weird--but as usual, remedial steps averted death. *heh*.

Surprisingly, since H1N1 is an upper respiratory disease, most folks can avert its worst effects--if not prevent infection outright--by simple hand washing and other common sense precautions, and if exposed, daily gargling with a salt water along with salt water rinse of nasal passages. IOW, the same things one would do to prevent a cold from running amok. Once flu's contracted, the same measures can result in nearly as effective a treatment as taking Tamiflu, especially if combined with drinking lots of WARM liquids (washes virus on areas exposed to the warm fluids down to stomach where it cannot flourish... and, heck, simply makes another "protein supplement" ;-))

[David]

3.

Oh, Dr. visit last week? For a cold/flu? Not this puppy. That would simply have been going in for a chance to be exposed to folks with (likely) something worse... :-)

[Cargosquid]

4.

Just heard on Beck's show (anecdotal, not verified)

one hospital stops testing once FLU is confirmed because treatment is the same. Why waste time and resources? Another told the father of a patient that they are told to report ALL cases as swine flu....

So, how do we know that its a pandemic? Flu (all strains) is ALWAYS a pandemic. Its global. We lose tens of thousands every year.

But its not an emergency, except to Obama. Now we have to see how Obama's administration is going to take advantage of THIS crisis....