Pandemic Does Not Mean Panic

Swine Flu has been in the media quite a bit the past few days, yet info about the disease seems to always be light in these reports. The biggest take away I got from the networks this morning is that there are 100 reported deaths in Mexico, and that cases have been reported in the United States. The networks then went on to report about how some European governments are recommending that their populations limit travel to North America, including the U.S. Of course, this type of announcement is news, especially in the economic climate we live in right now, but I can't help but feel as if CNN, FOX, and MSNBC have missed some key points in their reporting.

First, there is little or no talk about the mortality rate of this strain. Unconfirmed reports of 103 dead in Mexico means nothing in a vacuum. So 103 are dead, but how many are/were infected? And of those infected, how many received medical treatment? These are the important questions. If 103 died, and 200 were infected, that's a mortality rate of over 50% - and I'm worried. If 103 died out of 20,000 infected, I'm several orders of magnitude less concerned.

At the same time, I've actually heard people today postulating that eating pork can cause this disease. I'm sure this is coming from the fact that China has now banned live pork imports from Mexico and some U.S. states. The problem is, China's action was designed to keep infected swine from bringing the disease into China and then infecting Chinese swine. The action has nothing to do with people eating pork from Mexico.

And lastly... every major news report has talked about this new strain of swine flu becoming a 'pandemic'. What people need to understand is that pandemic is a technical tern describing an emerging disease that effects humans, across a loarge geographical range. It does not mean that the disease is necessarily going to kill millions (though that can and does happen).

The CDC, in an excellent proactive move is using the web to get accurate, responsible information out the the public. They are providing a link widget (written in ColdFusion, I might add) for people to use that will stay updated with direct links to the CDC fact sheet.


If you would like to use this widget, you can pull the source code from here:
http://www.hhs.gov/web/library/index.html#HHSWidgets

So try to ignore the the inflammatory reporting, and get your facts from the source.