Swine flu coverage outweighs TB which has higher death rate

May 17 2009 by Ken Oxley, Sunday Sun

WOULD it be uncharitable to suggest there are medical experts out there secretly hoping swine flu strikes with a vengeance in the autumn, just so they can turn around and say “told you so”?

There have been an awful lot of doom-mongers wheeled out lately to warn of the impending catastrophe who might look a tad foolish if it all turns out to be a millennium bug-style false alarm.

I may be forced to eat humble pie – assuming the dreaded killer lurgy doesn’t ruin my appetite – but I am confidently predicting a distinct lack of corpses. That’s not to say the so-called pandemic won’t claim some lives. But we really do need to get a grip because the hype has gone into overdrive.

Only this week a London-based newspaper ran an article in which an expert warned that one third of the world’s population – two billion people – will be infected.

Professor Neil Ferguson went on to point out that this did not mean anywhere near that many people will actually die, but that comment was somewhat buried.

I saw a fascinating piece of research this week which put the whole swine flu saga into perspective. It was carried out by Swedish professor Hans Rosling, a global health expert and, therefore, no slouch in such matters.

Prof Rosling compiled what he called a swine flu “news/death ratio” based on official figures collated during the first 13 days of the scare.

During that time, there were 31 deaths attributed to the disease and 63,066 stories about it. Over the same period there were 253,442 deaths from tuberculosis and just 6501 stories.

That means there were 8176 stories written for every one death from swine flu, while the number of stories per death for tuberculosis was 0.1.

Quite an eye-opener, isn’t it?