Saturday, June 13, 2009

FEAR MONGERING SWINE FLU

On June 11 the World Health Organization (WHO) warned 194 member nations to expect up to 1/3 of the population to be infected with the swine flu. However they also reinforced that this is a mild illness in the majority of cases.

The KEY here is to recognize that absolutely nothing has changed from when I first posted my major update on Swine Flu on April 29 that has now been viewed over one million times.

This promotion to Stage Six is still fear mongering, plain and simple. While it certainly qualifies for a pandemic in the strict definition of the term, they are using that term to instill fear in the population.

All a pandemic implies is that the infection is spread across the world.

It is important to note that even the fear spreading WHO is still stating the disease is mild, and the latest stats support this. As of June 12 only 145 deaths have occurred in the entire world. Mexico has the majority of the deaths at 108 and the US has had 27 deaths.

While any death is tragic, let me put these numbers in perspective for you. If you believe the CDC, 35,000 people die every year in the U.S. alone from the regular flu. That means that in the last six weeks when 27 people died from wine flu, there were over FOUR THOUSAND people who died from the regular flu. That is 150 times as many people dying from regular flu as swine flu.

Time magazine adds to the fear mongering by stating that:

The last pandemic — the Hong Kong flu of 1968 — killed about 1 million people. Ordinary flu kills about 250,000 to 500,000 people each year.”

If you use those numbers, the statistics for the swine flu are even worse.

Let’s assume the midpoint of 375,000 people die every year from ORDINARY flu. That means that 43,000 people have died from ordinary flu in the last six weeks and only 145 from swine flu. So nearly 300 times more people died from ordinary flu than swine flu, further confirming that swine flu is a relatively MILD disease for the vast majority of people.

The WHO announcement is simply more of the same. NOTHING has changed.

It is no surprise that more people have died or will continue to die. The major point is that this is a mild illness that will have virtually no major impact on death rates. It is not the Flu Pandemic of 1918 that killed 20 million people worldwide.

If you want further details on swine flu please review my original Critical Alert. Reviewing it again will provide a counterbalance to the major fear mongering the media is unleashing on you.

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