swine flue true statistics

[Alexander Kornishev]

not really nutrition info from vitamin D guru...
Link deleted. You must indicate whether your links are Work and Family Safe (WFS)

[Frank E Morel]

Move to medical?

[Ian Kovtunovich]

Originally Posted by Alexander Kornishev

not really nutrition info from vitamin D guru...
Link deleted. You must indicate whether your links are Work and Family Safe(WFS)

I'm not sure "true" is a word I would readily apply to Dr. Mercola : http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mercola.html (WFS). I'd certainly take anything from his website with a large grain of salt, and look for other sources of information. Mercola's assessment of the situation is fraught with non-sequiturs, well-poisoning, red herrings, and a host of other logical fallacies.

Think before you drink that Kool Aid.

[Eric Montgomery]

"so health officials can respond more quickly to the outbreak, which, allegedly, has killed more than 1,000 people in the United States."

How many people have died of the common cold/flu/pneumonia during this same time period? My guess is it's a number a lot bigger than 1,000. Unfortunately there's no cold or pneumonia vaccines for the medical industry to get rich off of....I can't help but wonder who benefits every time a "crisis" is announced.

[Alexander Kornishev]

re-posting the link WFSafe:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/ar...Emergency.aspx

[Robert Pierce]

Oh brother. Conspiracy theorists. Obviously this fellow hasn't talked to an elementary school teacher lately.

It is certainly true that the risk of death from H1N1 is low. Very low. However, never in 20 years of primary care practice have I ever seen the number of influenza-like-illnesses in young persons as I have in the last 8 weeks. Not even in the middle of a January seasonal flu season peak. Among many misleading points in the article:

Get this. The CDC stopped testing people for Swine Flu in JULY. Why? Because CDC assumed there was already an epidemic, and therefore more tests would be waste of time and money.

CBS has been trying to obtain state-by-state numbers for Swine Flu cases compiled, by the CDC, BEFORE the testing was stopped. The CDC has refused to come across with those numbers. It's been stonewalling CBS for the last three months.

One reason the CDC recommended no further testing for H1N1 because the sensitivity of the test, given the prevalence of the disease, did not provide that much additional useful information. It's Bayes theorem. It relates the prevalence of the disease and the sensitivity of the test to positive predictive value of the test, and in this case, the prevalence of the disease is so high that the pretest and posttest probabilities are not meaningfully different.

The other reason the CDC recommended no further testing for H1N1 is because of a concern about resistance to Tamiflu. Overuse of Tamiflu lead to resistance in one strain of seasonal flu last year. The same could happen with H1N1, and to reduce the likelihood of resistance, antiviral use has been restricted to the very young, the hospitalized, those with pneumonia, etc. The majority of those with symptoms get better with no treatment and thus do not need Tamiflu. Use of Tamiflu in these persons increases likelihood of resistance. More tests are a waste of time and money. Why test if 1) even if the test is negative, your posttest probability is still 50% and 2) you aren't going to treat anyway?

[Gonzalo Fernandez]

Originally Posted by Eric Montgomery

How many people have died of the common cold/flu/pneumonia during this same time period? My guess is it's a number a lot bigger than 1,000. Unfortunately there's no cold or pneumonia vaccines for the medical industry to get rich off of....I can't help but wonder who benefits every time a "crisis" is announced.

I wish people would actually take the time to research before they post. There actually is a "pneumonia vaccine". Here's the link

http://www.medicinenet.com/pneumococ...on/article.htm

And yes, I'm sure there is a company somewhere making money off of this.

[Robert D Taylor Jr]

Originally Posted by Alexander Kornishev

::re-posting the link WFSafe:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/ar...Emergency.aspx

The best part of that article was when the headline said "We were winning the misinformation battle" Truer words were never spoken

[Alexander Kornishev]

Presentation and personal related and all conspiracy theories aside there is facts I found useful from this rather long and somewhat annoying interview:
1) there is no confirmed statistics of N1H1 flue cases except those collected before august 30, 2009.
2) The way N1H1 cases are currently reported give very distorted picture and represent worst case scenario.
3) Vaccine has not been tested enough and number of reported serious side effects cases is still quite high.
4) Southern hemisphere finished their winter season without N1H1 pandemic.

Agreed that this guy is not doing very good job in the way he presents this material, but I still find the points above pretty important. Widespread media panic which has been going on from May of 2009 is hardly justified at this point.
Anyways, I think the main point of his interview was to urge people to do their own research, I am definitely going to do that.

[Gonzalo Fernandez]

Originally Posted by Alexander Kornishev

1) there is no confirmed statistics of N1H1 flue cases except those collected before august 30, 2009.

Actually, the patients who have been hospitalized for H1N1 have been tested and confirmed, 19 of which were kids who died. Do those statistics not count?