GLOBAL "PANDEMICS" AND SOME FACTS

by Debra Marcusse

As someone looking for the facts about the swine flu “pandemic,” I checked out the Australian flu statistics this past summer. In the southern hemisphere the seasons are the reverse of ours, and Australia’s bad flu season (“austral winter”) is during our summer. While the government websites over there spoke of masses of people clogging the emergency rooms, I spoke to an Australian nurse friend who said quite the opposite. “Didn’t notice anything extraordinary,” were her words.  Huh?

We all know the number of news stories here in the U.S. about H1N1 and the “epidemic” facing us this winter, along with media talk of a global “pandemic.” But what are some of the facts?

World Health Organization (WHO) has declared swine flu a high level “pandemic.”  But from April 17 to September 15, Australia's winter, there were just 137 deaths in Europe and about 3500 worldwide. European experts have stated that this virus has a lower mortality rate than the common flu.

Our own country declared a Public Health National Emergency on April 26, 2009, having at the time, in the month of April, seen just twenty cases of infection and zero deaths. But aren’t “epidemics” and “pandemics” way more serious than that?

Well, just before WHO made the declaration, they actually changed the definition of “pandemic” from
           An influenza pandemic ... resulting in several, simultaneous epidemics worldwide  with enormous numbers of deaths and illness
to
          A disease epidemic [with] more cases of that disease than normal... Pandemics can be either mild or severe in the illness and death they cause.

This change in definition paved the way for Stage 6 of the “pandemic” to be declared. However, a recent British Medical Journal (BMJ) article expresses that this re-definition has caused significant confusion.

MIT doctoral student Peter Doshi expresses his concerns in a Sept. 3 article published by the BMJ (BMJ 2009;339:b3471 ) about official response to the H1N1 outbreak: 

"Measures were taken that in hindsight may be seen as alarmist, overly restrictive, or even unjustified," he wrote. "The large sums of public money spent on pandemic preparedness underlined the seriousness of the threat..."

However, Doshi said the 2009 "pandemic," taken as a whole, bears little resemblance to the forecasted pandemic. According to today's estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 22 million Americans have come down with H1N1 since April, 98,000 have been hospitalized and approximately 3,900 have died. In August, White House officials warned the virus could cause 30,000 to 90,000 deaths.

But during an average U.S. winter, normal seasonal flu strains result in an average of 200,000 hospitalizations and 36,000 deaths – about 10 times the current swine-flu death rate reported by the CDC.  (Quoted in WND.)

In fact, WHO called swine flu a "pandemic" in April when less than 150 deaths from H1N1 had been reported in just 74 countries - that's about 2 deaths per country!  MIT’s Doshi warns, "Public health responses not calibrated to the threat may be perceived as alarmist, eroding the public trust and resulting in people ignoring important warnings when serious epidemics do occur" (ibid).

Crying “Wolf!” may be only one danger of these declarations of disaster. Teresa Forcades, a nun and also a physician specializing in internal medicine (MD from SUNY, Ph.D. in public health from the University of Barcelona), expresses the fears of many about the political consequences of this emergency declaration. People may eventually be subjected to mandatory vaccine orders against their will because of this elevation of the status of the “pandemic.”  Access more of what she says here.

Sharyl Attkisson is an award-winning CBS News correspondent and investigative reporter, the one who initiated the CBS investigation. She says, "“One of my good sources within the government said to me that they’re either trying to, in his opinion, over-represent the swine flu numbers or under-represent by not counting them anymore. He said, 'You need to find out which it is.' And so to find out which it might be, I really wanted to see the data that the CDC had at the time it made the decision to quit counting the cases.” Ms. Attkisson's findings can be found here.

Researching all of this causes me to conclude that there may be some unwarranted fears being published about the current flu “epidemic.”  Remember that Dr. Forcades states: “the H1N1 virus has a high infection rate but lower mortality rate than the annual seasonal flu virus.”  Certainly, be wise. Avoid crowded public venues if you can. Wash your hands OFTEN! Eat, exercise, and sleep wisely. But try not to live in fear all the time. That’s even worse for your health than having the flu.

We here at MedicalMile.com will do our best to keep you up on the latest news from around the country and around the world. We’ll look for facts we’re not hearing elsewhere. We’ll present them to you. But it will be up to you to weigh the facts and make your own decisions (so far, at least) about what to do to keep yourself and your family healthy.


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www.medicalmile.com

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Don't waste a good crisis jeffhoneyager Fri. Nov. 13, 2009 I seems that it is easier to promote an agenda if there is a crisis; real or created. Reply

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