Defining pandemics down
Bookworm on Jun 14 2009 at 8:06 pm | Filed under: Health
WHO excitedly announced a few days ago that swine flu was a pandemic. To my old-fashioned mind, pandemic means a deadly disease running riot around the world, threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Swine flu is definitely traveling, and it’s out of season, but so far (thank God), deaths have been in the low triple digits. How, then, can it be a pandemic, sufficient to justify WHO exerting control over a variety of the world’s governments? Simple: by defining pandemic down. Here’s Michael Fumento:
The WHO definition for “influenza pandemic” once required “several, simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” But in 2005, it promulgated a definition that virtually ignores the number of cases and completely ignores deaths. Now it requires “sustained chains of human-to-human transmission leading to community-wide outbreaks” in two parts of the world, with this addition: The cause must be an animal or human-animal flu virus; the latter is known as genetic reassortment.
Thus, under this definition, “community-wide outbreaks” of swine flu in two South American countries and somewhere in China could qualify as a pandemic. No deaths required. And a pure human flu that killed 20 million people would not qualify.
Why this change? Because WHO has decided that anything that leaps from animals to humans is a deadly risk, regardless of actual risk:
The obvious presumption is that viruses with animal genes pose a greater threat. But that’s “a matter of faith more than science,” says James Chin, a University of California Berkeley epidemiologist who was in charge of surveillance and control of communicable diseases at the WHO in the late 1980s.
Indeed, the science indicates the presumption is false. The WHO first warned of an H5N1 avian flu pandemic in 2004, projecting up to 150 million deaths. Yet a 2007 study found H5N1 — though detected in 1959 — was many mutations away from the ability to become readily transmissible among humans.
I strongly suggest you read Fumento’s entire article, which distinguishes carefully between science and the politics of fear.
Speaking of the politics of fear, my Mom is always a good barometer of the media, because she watches a great deal of it, and it informs her ideas. Conversation today revealed that she’s fearful Obama can’t handle simultaneous crises in Iran and North Korea, and that she thinks recycling is bunk (and that recycled paper products are expensive and ineffective). She didn’t arrive at these ideas on her own. She’s picking them up from hints in the media.
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4 Responses to “Defining pandemics down”
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I decided that I would worry about the swine flu when I was on my deathbed from it. Haven’t seen anything to change my opinion. Perhaps from having spent over 4 years in Latin America, I don’t worry much about that stuff. The longer I was in Latin America, the more trips I made to Latin America, the healthier I was. It’s not that all those warnings were nonsense, but that one learns how to operate with sensibility and common sense, while your body also adapts.
(Scientific or not, I operate on the assumption that copious amounts of hot peppers and garlic have helped keep me free of many infections through the years.)
If your mother is picking up those hints in the MSM, then perhaps the MSM isn’t as worthless as I and many others assume.
So the WHO also believes in not letting a good crisis go to waste. Or if there isn’t a crisis at hand, in manufacturing one.
And I thoroughly agree with Gringo that hot peppers and garlic ward off infection. I would add that they also ward off vampires, do-gooders, coworkers, and people who want to share your bus seat.
I have mixed feelings on this. The WHO people and epidemiologists I have heard have been pretty realistic about the problem, but the media hype it. WHO and CDC have to make the public aware so it gets reports and can track the disease. They really don’t know exactly what they are dealing with, and they need the data. They also need advance time to get a vaccine developed and produced in sufficient quantities for vulnerable population groups. Even if swine flu doesn’t cause a catastrophe, I think they will have added to their information base, possibly enabling them to avert a future catastrophe.
Spices do seem to ramp up your immune system. If only because your sinuses get a good working and thus allergies are kind of hard to top because your immune system gets used to figuring out what is or is not safe.