Swine flu in perspective

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Among all the other scares we had in a turbulent 2009 - terrorism, the financial meltdown, companies collapsing around our ears, banks failing, jobs disappearing – swine flu loomed large to panic the nation into the possibility of an epidemic which could potentially kill thousands of people, young and old.

Swine flu is a worrying development, mainly because it affects the very young, pregnant women and obese people in particular, but it hasn’t been the plague many feared – most people who caught the bug had a mild form of flu and recovered well. But the scare was, as usual, blown out of all proportion by the media – one mum I know was shocked and horrified when her young son came home one day in tears saying that his school friends had told him that she was going to die because she had swine flu – she did have a few days off work feeling unwell, but it was a mild case and she came out of it unharmed!

I worry that we are addicted to being scared out of our wits, but that we are also so removed from what is really going on in the world that we cannot put anything into perspective for ourselves, rather relying on the media to tell us what to think. What happened to independent thought?

In fact, John Oxford, Professsor of Virology at Barts Hospital said in The Observer’s round up of 2009 that far fewer people than usual died from this flu epidemic – and certainly far fewer than the media coverage would have us expect: “Swine flu has been relatively mild, but it has killed 9,000 people worldwide, including several hundred in the UK… But remember that 25,000 people in the UK died of seasonal flu in the winter of 1999-2000, mainly the elderly, and nobody seemed to care about that.” He did go on to say that he was worried about the possible mutation of the virus in 2010 and that it would then affect older people - and therefore have a much larger death rate.

Since the article was written there have been more deaths around the world and the worldwide death rate stands at 12,198 – still a small amount compared to the usual seasonal death rates we expect to see worldwide.

The Health Protection Agency estimates there have been 780,000 cases of swine flu since the pandemic began, but the cases of swine flu in the UK have been decreasing over the past few months. It will rear its ugly head again next year, but will we panic, or will we take it in our stride – and calmly vaccinate those most vulnerable – around 80 million people have been vaccinated worldwide so far according to John Oxford.

All the facts about swine flu and how to treat it can be found at The Direct Government site.

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