Alarmist Media, How Worried Do We Really Need To Be?
Posted on Aug 21, 2009 by Reena Daruwalla | Comments 0
Sample these headlines which you will typically read in your local newspaper, hear on the TV news or read in your Google reader:
- Preparing for the Worst
- Experts Worried Vaccines Won’t be Ready on Time
- Schools Shut down
- Death Toll Rises World Wide
- The Worst is Yet to come
- WHO predicts ‘explosion’ of swine flu cases
It’s true that the H1N1 virus has caused a worldwide pandemic however there is a need to put things in perspective. The government keeps saying ‘Don’t Panic’ and for once this is very sage advice indeed. A Newsweek article did well to put a lot of things into perspective; in a sense making us look at the Swine flu problem through a telescope rather than a microscope! It made the following salient points:
- Firstly the term pandemic, which somehow sounds worse than epidemic is some thing that has a wide global spread, an epidemic over a large area. Even the common cold can be classified as a pandemic, since pretty much everyone on earth gets it!
- Heart disease and cancer are far deadlier than Swine Flu
- This pandemic is nothing compared to previous Flu pandemics such as 1918’s Spanish Flu, which claimed 50 million people worldwide or the Asian flu which took 2 million lives in 1958-59.
- For an otherwise healthy person, the Swine flu is only as dangerous as regular flu. If the regular flu has a low incidence of deaths resulting from it, so does the swine flu. The percentage of death from positive cases is just .01% or one in a thousand.
- Like the regular flu, the swine flu will resolve itself in time.
- It is usually immune compromised individuals and later complications in the illness that lead to death; it is not the swine flu itself that is responsible for the actual fatalities in many cases
- The most common demographic of young healthy individuals is least at risk; children, senior citizens and pregnant women
- Yes it is true that swine flu is spreading more quickly; this is because most people have not developed antibodies and immunity to it.
So right now the statistics are much cause for comfort and so long and the general populace observes good hygiene, and the government shows good leadership and communication, the situation will not get out of hand. So really at this stage we don’t really have much need to be worried; merely careful.
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Posted in: Swine Flu News
