>>>>>>>http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/140492/Million-hit-by-plague-worse-than-swine-flu-
>>>>>>
>>>>>>http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5iNNTDa8W3qJUuPAfx3fqSsToWvOQ
>>>>>
>>>>>Thank you.
>>>>
>>>>This whole flu thing is just so much fear-mongering headline news fodder. People die from many things and this whole flu thing accounts for very few relative to major causes of death.
>>>
>>>Right. Except every hundred years or so, a strange and strong mutation seems to occur. Maybe, now that we have vaccines, we can avert them from now on.
>>
>>There is no indication that a "strong mutation" has occurred or, even if it has, whether this will have any real impact on society at large. It is entirely fear mongering, news propaganda using pointless comparisons to a society that was so dramatically different from today’s.
>
>I agree there is a lot of fear mongering among the media. However, here in NC we had seven deaths from the flu last week. What's interesting is that for many years, the seasonal fu was killing 30,000 a year and yet very few were actually getting seasonal flu shots or even knew how many were dying from it. If this media craziness prompts more folks to take precautions (washing hands, sneezing and coughing into their elbows, using disinfectant wipes after touching things that many people touch, etc) and get the flu shots, hopefully deaths from both flu viruses will become fewer in the future.

That some have died from flu is not useful information. That some number of people are getting flu is not useful information. One needs to look at how many die from flu normally each year, what the normal rate of infection has been in years gone by, and compare statistics like these to the current flu virus.

And comparing just one year to the next is insufficient to draw any conclusion. A multi-decade comparison needs to be done in order to try and understand whether this particular virus strain is really significant or not. But then you hit the problem of not being able to compare the society infrastructure, education of the population, medical facility, medical technology, health-care, and innumerable other aspects because society changes all the time as does medical care. Let alone the problem of miss-diagnosing causes of death so that even those stats become difficult to correctly categorize.

This is a far more complex risk analysis problem than what we see via the news media which is entirely driven by the desire to sell more commercial time and by companies who just love the idea of selling 10x more disinfectant wipes than they have ever before. Really, this is not a simple issue at all.

Then there is a real problem about unintended consequences and changes in risk behaviour. For a simple example; how many people died in 9/11? 3000 is the number we hear. But actually its more like 4600 because there was a spike in traffic related deaths directly after 9/11 attributed to people choosing the less safe motor-transport option rather than flying. For a really good look into the fear mongering that goes on check out (amongst others) The Science of Fear by Daniel Gardner - http://tinyurl.com/yk5ketj