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In this year of economic crisis people have had to keep count of everything. It seems that the media and many governments have decided to stop counting just when it would be necessary to assign the proper value to the numbers that are issued by the agencies in order to reassure the population and avoid situations that are beyond rational control.
For example, if someone wants to search the internet for mortality rates linked to the common flu over the past years, he is overwhelmed with current data referring solely to the H1N1 pandemic. However it shouldn’t be so difficult for the experts from the various health ministries.
It’s a shame that this simple evaluation is being avoided. Let's analyze the numbers in a simple way. All of the reports say that at this moment the H1N1 virus is dominant over the other viral strains, therefore when we hear about the flu epidemic it almost always means H1N1 virus infections.
The H1N1 virus is not an aggressive one and therefore when they say that a person has died in concomitance with the H1N1 virus, it means that the person died WITH the virus, not that he died FROM the virus. This is a fundamental difference, but it's rarely pointed out.
If we take Australia for example, during the winter season (which lasts from May to September) of 2007, 2,623 deaths were linked to flu or flu-related pneumonia. This number is identical to that of previous years. We're referring to data from the Australian ministry of health, even though the same mortality rate is similar in all countries of the world.
The current analysis of deaths caused by H1N1 in the 2009 season that is ending should open everyone's eyes. As a matter of fact, with the H1N1 virus at its peak this year, Australia had to count 161 deaths because of the flu. This amounts to a twentieth of those that are usually caused by common flu. The vaccine has nothing to do with these numbers because, as we all know, it isn't ready yet and still needs to be experimented.
So this year Australia recorded 161 deaths (the number will probably grow by a few points in the next two weeks that separate us from the actual beginning of spring in the southern hemisphere) compared to the 2500 deaths that are normally expected.
The situation in Brazil is similar: it's reporting around 600 deaths (in a population of around 180 million inhabitants) compared with the expected 15,000 deaths from flu during the season. But even with this significant downsizing of the previous estimates and risk involved with the severity of the H1N1 infection, the newspapers point to Brazil as the zone in which there has been the greatest number of H1N1 deaths in the world…
Evidently this pandemic responds to the needs of financial or power groups that indirectly or directly benefit from a persistent state of unjustified and detrimental panic. We can only wonder why simple considerations such as these are not made and publicized by those very organizations that are supposed to attend to the health and lives of citizens.
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