Just how scared should you be?
According to the European Center for Disease Control, there were 4,092 confirmed deaths from swine flu around the world up until September the 1st. If the same rate were to hold out for the rest of the year, that number would grow to 6,138 deaths from swine flu throughout 2009.
If we look at these numbers and compare them with other common causes of death:
In an average year approximately 25,000 people around the world are killed by lightning strikes. You are therefore four times more likely to be killed by lightning than swine flu.
Global deaths from malaria are estimated at somewhere between 1.5 million to 3 million -- 250 to 500 times the projected toll from swine flu.
Vehicle accidents account for an annual average of 1.2 million deaths and up to 50 million serious, crippling injuries. Thus you are again over 200 times to die on the road, than from piggy disease. This does not take into account the approximately 30% or more of the planet's population who never use motorised transport, most of whom are expected to contract the flu.
We could go on listing other more likely causes of death, shark attack, household electrocution, bee stings, jellyfish, snake bite, spider bite, dog attack are all more likely to cause your demise than piglet's little cold.
Fear is far more likely to cause severe problems than the disease itself.
That can be seen to have happened since the swine flu was first identified in 2008:
* China and Hong Kong quarantined travelers from North America, including 22 Canadian students with no symptoms, 300 guests and employees who happened to be in a hotel where a Mexican man was isolated, and everybody in Singapore who happened to have visited Mexico ...
* "Social distancing" measures included closure of 700 schools in the U.S., disrupting the education of 245,000 children
* Numerous countries restricted travel to and from Mexico and banned meat from North America, causing economic damage. In fact, Mexico's GNP declined by up to 0.5 percent in a few weeks.
* Egypt culled 400,000 pigs, an act of irrational discrimination against the country's Christian minority
* Afghanistan's only known pig was imprisoned in a room, away from visitors to Kabul zoo where it normally grazed beside deer and goats because of the public's irational fear.
Panic is, to a large degree, what makes an outbreak catastrophic. It causes individuals and institutions to act irrationally -- to cease activities that are necessary for society to function smoothly. It sends people running to emergency rooms when they get a sniffle, overwhelming health care systems at the worst possible time.
Tufts' Laws has studied people’s perception of risk -- what makes people terrified of something that is highly unlikely to hurt them, shark attacks, swine flu for example, while not worrying at all about far more dangerous activities like smoking cigarettes, crossing the road or driving a car.
"One of the most powerful factors," he writes, "is social amplification of risk. Worries can be contagious and rapidly infect people within a social group. In modern society, the mass media are by far the most powerful carriers of contagion."
And the media are getting plenty of grist for their sensationalist mills.
In April, The United States Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano called a press conference and declared a public-health emergency. In August, officials for the Centers for Disease Control warned that H1N1 could infect half of the U.S. population and kill 90,000 Americans by year’s end. CDC officials estimated that 1 in 10 New Yorkers had contracted the virus this spring.
Meanwhile, the Observer, a British tabloid, breathlessly citing a leaked U.N. report, offered the specter of "millions" of rotting corpses and "anarchy" spreading across the developing world.
Unsurprisingly, people’s fears of the flu are growing with every sensational headline.
In May, 1 in 5 respondents told Gallup that they expected a family member to contract the swine flu; by August that number had almost doubled. Over those same months, belief that the government was able to handle the situation dropped by 14 points -- from 74 percent to 60 percent.
Exaggerated fear has potential consequences beyond overwhelming ERs with nervous patients who should be resting at home consuming soup.
In mid-July, a Health and Human Services advisory committee "strongly recommended that [HHS Secretary Kathleen] Sebelius give the green light to vaccine production by Aug. 15 -- before safety and dosing tests are finished." The U.S. government ordered 195 million doses of a new H1N1 vaccine, which is being fast-tracked through the normal drug development and approval process. Whether that proves to be a problem or turns out to have been justified remains to be seen.
The best cure for swine flu hysteria may be a healthy dose of salt.
When the news trumpets the latest fatality, remember that through the end of April, while not a single American had died as a result of the swine flu, the CDC estimated that 13,000 had already succumbed to complications arising from the plain old vanilla "seasonal flu."
Public-health officials, epidemiologists and clinicians have to worry about H1N1. As things stand, you really don’t.
(With thanks to Joshua Holland.)
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