I have been watching the media reports about swine flu for almost a week now and as someone who has worked in EMS for 15 years I can only scratch my head in bewilderment at the sheer stupidity I see around me.  I was looking at some of the outlandish reports, and I thought it would be useful for you if I picked apart one example of such reporting and explain why it is so ridiculous.

I went to Google and typed in “swine flu pandemic” yesterday and this is one of the first article hits that came up.

I didn’t have to look far.  The first paragraph pissed me off.  I will quote the text here:

MEXICO CITY – Global health authorities warned Wednesday that swine flu was threatening to bloom into a pandemic, and the virus spread farther in Europe even as the outbreak appeared to stabilize at its epicenter. A toddler who succumbed in Texas became the first death outside Mexico. New cases and deaths finally seemed to be leveling off in Mexico, where 160 people have been killed, after an aggressive public health campaign.

 The very first sentence warns that the swine flu is about to turn into a pandemic, yet in the same breath it also tells you that it has stabilized at its epicenter.  If you read my last rant about this you will know that in order for a disease to become a pandemic it must kill droves of people, usually over a million.  Yet in less than a week this so-called plague has stabilized even at its root.  An outbreak that kills 160 people and subsides in a week does not a pandemic make.  The second sentence tries to tug at the reader’s heart strings and tells of a toddler who died of the flu.  It is horrible that a toddler had to die of this but to be completely honest, this is normal and expected.  The two groups that most often succumb to the flu are the elderly and very young children.  Both groups are susceptible to pneumonia after such an infection and this kills dozens of people every day.  More on those statistics in a minute.  The third sentence must have been disappointing for the author to write.  The author was obviously trying to whip the reader up into a fearful frenzy with the headline, but that must be hard when you have to do pesky little things like report the truth.  The truth according to the third sentence is that the deaths are leveling off and that this is going away.  So why on earth would the headline be, “WHO warns swine flu threatening to become pandemic?”  Lets look at the next paragraph to find out:

“But the World Health Organization said the global threat is nevertheless serious enough to ramp up efforts to produce a vaccine against the virus.”

Aha!  There it is!  There’s gold in them thar infections.

In order to shed some light on this, lets go straight to the CDC.  They just happen to have this handy dandy facts page about the flu that will shed some light on this. 

On this page you will note some statistics for the United States.  Here is a quote:

Every year in the United States, on average: 

• 1. 5% to 20% of the population gets the flu;
• 2. more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from flu-related complications; and
• 3. about 36,000 people die from flu-related causes.

 

• If we extrapolate from this a bit, we will learn that every day an average of 548 people are hospitalized with the flu and related complications.  This means that about 3,836 people are hospitalized each week.  From the same data we find that 98 people die everyday from this and the average week will bring about 690 deaths.  So can someone tell me why we are concerned with a flu outbreak that made up just a small percentage of the total hospitalizations and deaths that occur every day?  If the CDC wants to whip us into a frenzy, they shouldn’t leave stuff like this lying around on their website.

Another set of documents the CDC shouldn’t leave up if they want to insight panic are the National Vital Statistics Records they publish every few weeks throughout the year.  The CDC studies births, deaths, causes of death, and other such statistics about our population and publishes this right on their website for everyone to see.  It isn’t terribly easy to search this material, and it is not the kind of light reading any sane person keeps on their nightstand, but hey, that’s what I’m here for.

The latest mention to influenza that I can find in one of these reports is in Volume 56, Number 16 published on June 11, 2008. Notice that this is “preliminary data” and not “final data.”  Many scientists are eager to get their hands on this data which is why the CDC bothers to publish preliminary findings.  They usually do not differ that much from the final numbers.  It also takes a couple of years to compile these numbers which is why this data is for 2006.  However, these are the latest numbers that the CDC has, and that is why I am using them here.  The reader should also notice that the CDC is very careful to publish two sets of numbers for influenza.  The categories are “influenza” and “influenza and pneumonia.”  The reason for this is that hardly anyone ever dies from just the flu.  Why?  Because the flu just isn’t that bad.  How many times have you had it?  Patients who die from the flu are, like I said, older people and young children with some sort of compromise already in place, and the resulting pneumonia is what gets them.  In fact, the vast majority of patients who die from a chronic illness succumb to pneumonia rather than the actual disease.  This is true for Lou Gehrig’s, cancer, MS, and countless other diseases.

Please take a look at this document and make your way to page four.  Here you will find that “influenza and pneumonia” are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States.  You will also find on page five that it is estimated that 56,247 people died of “flu and pneumonia” in 2006.  That’s even larger than the number the CDC let slip on their handy dandy facts page.  According to this 154 people die of this every single day in the United States.  So much attention was focused on this toddler that died in Texas of the swine flu.  What about the 153 other people that died that day of the ‘normal flu?’  Did we hear about them?

We have gotten off track here.  What about the rest of the article?

The first U.S. death from the outbreak was a Mexico City toddler who traveled to Texas with family and died Monday night at a Houston hospital. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius predicted the child would not be the last U.S. death from swine flu.

Oh, so now this toddler was not even from the United States.  Most of the reports I have seen use this as confirmation that the flu has hit our country.  Thank God Kathleen Sebelius told us that we can expect more deaths.  How right she was!  We probably had another 150 deaths on that day.  Do you think she gave another 150 press conferences that day?

Eight states closed schools Wednesday, affecting 53,000 students in Texas alone, and President Barack Obama said wider school closings might be necessary to keep crowds from spreading the flu. Mexico has already closed schools nationwide until at least May 6.

I wonder how much this costs?  How many kids were scared?  How many parents?  How many lost days at school were there and how much will it cost to catch up from that? 

“Every American should know that the federal government is prepared to do whatever is necessary to control the impact of this virus,” Obama said, highlighting his request for $1.5 billion in emergency funding for vaccines.

Ding, Ding, Ding…can you hear the cash register?  This may be the real cause of this pandemic.  I wonder who makes money from these vaccines?  That will be the subject of another blog post.  I need to stay on target and bring this home.

In addition to the 160 deaths, the virus is believed to have sickened 2,498 people across Mexico. But only 1,311 suspected swine flu patients remained hospitalized, and a closer look at daily admissions and deaths at Mexico’s public hospitals suggests the outbreak may have peaked during three grim days last week when thousands of people complained of flu symptoms.

Lets take a closer look at this particular piece of retardation.  Remember the statistics from the CDC above that state that an average of 36,000 people die from the flu each year, and 200,000 people are hospitalized?  Another way to say that is 18% of people hospitalized for the flu will die due to complications.  This was just a bit of simple math: 36,000 / 200,000 = 0.18 or 18%.  In Mexico 1,311 remain hospitalized (which means there were probably more) and 160 deaths.  So lets do that math: 160 / 1,311 = 12.2% which is also equal to a steaming pile of horse shit.  This flu is not even as deadly as the regular flu.  And wait, this thing peaked after three days?  And we still want to spend $1.5 billion on vaccinations that won’t be ready until long after this flu has run its course and left?  Now I am an outraged taxpayer demanding to know what the hell is wrong with my government.

Medical detectives have not zeroed in on where the outbreak began. One of the seven deaths in Mexico directly attributed to swine flu was that of a Bangladeshi immigrant, said Mexico’s chief epidemiologist, who suggested that someone could have brought the virus from Pakistan or Bangladesh.

What!?!  What!?!  Did I hear that right?  Only seven deaths out of the 160 have been directly attributed to swine flu?  Really!?!  I’m not even going to flesh that out.  I think you got this one without my help.

Towards the end they slip in this quote:

The deaths were already leveling off by the time Mexico announced the epidemic April 23. At hospitals Wednesday, lines of anxious citizens seeking care for flu symptoms dwindled markedly.

I guess they figured no one was reading by this point, so they could slip a few facts in here, and it would go unnoticed.  I think I’ll stop there as I am sick of it too.  But this should make us take a long hard look at the original headline: “WHO warns swine flu threatening to become pandemic.”  The real headline should read “World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control are a bunch of money grubbing fear mongering wankers!”  Or perhaps, “Who cares what the WHO says: Tards on Parade!”

The only thing pandemic about this outbreak is the lunacy of the media and our government.  Why has this happened?  Why hasn’t someone pulled the break cord on this bus so we can all get off on the next sanity stop?  There is a culture or fear and forced agenda here in the United States.  Have you ever had a meeting with a board member, a County Judge, or a Mayor who had a head full of media bullshit and an electorate whose heads were full of false information?  This particular kind of misinformed bureaucrat is simply impossible to deal with.  Even if you sat down, and showed this person all the evidence and truly made them believe that all this fear mongering was false they would still look at you and say, “It is easier to just close down the schools for a couple of days instead of trying to convince everyone that this is all bullshit.  Just spend a few hundred dollars buying hand cleanser, give a sound bite to the media, and everyone will forget this happened in a couple of weeks.”  I have been to these meetings, and this is exactly what gets said.

I am tired of living according to the lowest common denominator of fear mongering and false reporting.  I’m tired of people who are so stupid that they quit buying pork because of a non existent pandemic that wouldn’t even be transmitted through food even if it hadn’t been made up by the media to begin with.

I am sure that the makers of Tamiflu® and Relenza® are going to make some bank soon.  I am also sure that the demand for vaccinations will skyrocket and the companies that make them will enjoy that $1.5 billion boost from the Obama Administration.  I can also predict that the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control will be able to pat themselves on the back in a few months for saving the world from a nonexistent pandemic and enjoy a nice funding round during the next budget cycle.  And I’m sure that a few more newspapers were sold even though most of them are going to tank anyway because you can get more accurate reporting on my blog than you can get from any of them.  I have no idea which set of money grubbing douche bags orchestrated this, but I do know one thing for certain: taxpayers like you an me are going to wind up paying the bill for government supported immunizations and medications, lost days from school, emergency preparedness, and a complete laundry list of other outrages for no damn good reason.

If this pisses you off too, then leave a comment on the blog.  Then leave a comment on your representative’s website.  Stay in good health people.  Don’t be scared of the flu, be afraid of the bureaucrat with his hand in your pocket.

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