Swine flu: avoid sensationalism and check the figures

It seems that there's still a lot of media hype going on with regard to swine flu, with claims being made that it's "unstoppable" and out of control. As I've mentioned previously the main thing that you need to focus on isn't how many people are contracting the illness but how many actually die as a direct consequence.

The Wikipedia entry for 2009 flu pandemic gives a set of figures which I havn't seen reported in any of the mainstream media articles (which seem to be mostly only succeeding in promoting fear and hysteria). Assuming that these figures are reasonably accurate the mortality rate worldwide is around 0.5%, or 1 in 200, with the numbers varying from one country to the next (in the UK it's only 0.05%). This is higher than so-called "seasonal" flu, but not by a margin great enough to be convincingly beyond measurement error, since there will of course be many people who become sick and either don't know that it's swine flu, are never tested, or choose not to report it and subsequently recover. Realistically if I were to get flu-like symptoms and am not specifically tested for H1N1, how am I going to know the difference? I'm probably not.

Compare this with avian flu, and there's a gigantic difference in mortality. In the case of H5N1 over half of those people who contracted it died within a few weeks.

So I'd say that swine flu is only something worth worrying about if it mutates into a form with a significantly higher mortality rate. Thus far those people who have been victims seem to have largely fallen into the traditional categories of those at the extreme ends of the age range, or who have preexisting medical conditions which compromise their immunity.

Although it's claimed that 40 people per day could die from swine flu by the end of August, to put this in context - something which mainstream media reporters never do - from the latest figures I could find (2002) on the National Statistics website about 100 people are killed or seriously injured every day in road accidents in the UK - almost equivalent to two 7/7 terrorist attacks (which really makes me wonder about the cost/benefit of all the anti terror measures taken in the last five years).