A barrage of media coverage — photographs of people wearing face masks and stories about terrified officials closing schools.
How to avoid it? How many will it kill?
Are we all going to die?
Remove the letters “d,” “e” and “m” from the word “pandemic” and you get America’s response to swine flu. But are the school closings, canceled travel plans and frantic calls to doctors worthy of the threat?
Incredibly, with a fact-gathering tool as powerful as the Internet, people still react without thinking to the hyperbole of a public official and a scary headline on the 5:30 news. In doing so they create problems disproportionate to the hazard and actually impair the official response.
Regarding swine flu, the doctor’s orders would seem to be: Take a deep breath (face masks optional) because a check of the facts reveals swine flu will be no worse than the barnyard varieties of flu we deal with on a regular basis.
But there’s that menacing word: “pandemic.” It sounds so much like “epidemic,” doesn’t it? What most people don’t know is the word “pandemic” refers to the coverage area of a contagion, not its severity. The World Health Organization recently elevated swine flu to a category 6, its highest level of coverage, which means the virus has spread to enough countries to be considered a global phenomenon. But that doesn’t mean it will be Shiva, destroyer of worlds.
In its most recent report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates as many as 34 million cases of swine flu have been reported in the United States from April through October, resulting in as many as 153,000 hospitalizations and 6,000 deaths (the high estimates).
Those are frightening numbers — until you consider that in a normal, non-pandemic year as many as 36,000 Americans die of the flu.
Let’s put those numbers into context. Suppose you heard that in your county, 10 people died of swine flu. You might be tempted to keep your children home, load up the rifles and sit down to a meal of MREs and a screening of “28 Days Later.” Yet in a normal year as you shopped at Walmart, dodged sniffles at the office and warmed chicken soup for your flu-addled family, 60 people in your county died of ordinary flu.
What would you do? Probably nothing.
Yet parents demanding that little Abercrombie receive the vaccine are besieging doctors’ offices, creating problems of supply, demand and more importantly, the physicians’ ability to respond to legitimate health issues. And the indiscriminate use of anti-virals such as Tamiflu actually poses the risk of breeding a vaccine-resistant strain of the virus.
More significantly, the very latest WHO report indicates the pandemic may have spiked in North America. The CDC reports new cases and hospitalizations have fallen three weeks in a row in November. Has the biological apocalypse passed us by? That possibility has somehow escaped folks.
And while the virulence of swine flu isn’t known right now, it appears, from most reports, that it’s no more potent than ordinary flu.
It’s entirely possible the swine flu virus could mutate and become a deadly killer. But it’s more likely the virus will simply run its course and you will deal with it the way you dealt with SARS, ebola and West Nile … by living your lives as you always have.
Thirty-six thousand killed by regular flu. Six thousand killed by swine flu?
Pandemic or panic?
Don’t panic.
How to avoid it? How many will it kill?
Are we all going to die?
Remove the letters “d,” “e” and “m” from the word “pandemic” and you get America’s response to swine flu. But are the school closings, canceled travel plans and frantic calls to doctors worthy of the threat?
Incredibly, with a fact-gathering tool as powerful as the Internet, people still react without thinking to the hyperbole of a public official and a scary headline on the 5:30 news. In doing so they create problems disproportionate to the hazard and actually impair the official response.
Regarding swine flu, the doctor’s orders would seem to be: Take a deep breath (face masks optional) because a check of the facts reveals swine flu will be no worse than the barnyard varieties of flu we deal with on a regular basis.
But there’s that menacing word: “pandemic.” It sounds so much like “epidemic,” doesn’t it? What most people don’t know is the word “pandemic” refers to the coverage area of a contagion, not its severity. The World Health Organization recently elevated swine flu to a category 6, its highest level of coverage, which means the virus has spread to enough countries to be considered a global phenomenon. But that doesn’t mean it will be Shiva, destroyer of worlds.
In its most recent report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates as many as 34 million cases of swine flu have been reported in the United States from April through October, resulting in as many as 153,000 hospitalizations and 6,000 deaths (the high estimates).
Those are frightening numbers — until you consider that in a normal, non-pandemic year as many as 36,000 Americans die of the flu.
Let’s put those numbers into context. Suppose you heard that in your county, 10 people died of swine flu. You might be tempted to keep your children home, load up the rifles and sit down to a meal of MREs and a screening of “28 Days Later.” Yet in a normal year as you shopped at Walmart, dodged sniffles at the office and warmed chicken soup for your flu-addled family, 60 people in your county died of ordinary flu.
What would you do? Probably nothing.
Yet parents demanding that little Abercrombie receive the vaccine are besieging doctors’ offices, creating problems of supply, demand and more importantly, the physicians’ ability to respond to legitimate health issues. And the indiscriminate use of anti-virals such as Tamiflu actually poses the risk of breeding a vaccine-resistant strain of the virus.
More significantly, the very latest WHO report indicates the pandemic may have spiked in North America. The CDC reports new cases and hospitalizations have fallen three weeks in a row in November. Has the biological apocalypse passed us by? That possibility has somehow escaped folks.
And while the virulence of swine flu isn’t known right now, it appears, from most reports, that it’s no more potent than ordinary flu.
It’s entirely possible the swine flu virus could mutate and become a deadly killer. But it’s more likely the virus will simply run its course and you will deal with it the way you dealt with SARS, ebola and West Nile … by living your lives as you always have.
Thirty-six thousand killed by regular flu. Six thousand killed by swine flu?
Pandemic or panic?
Don’t panic.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.