We were almost at a critical point were nearly 5 months into a new year and noone had come up with a new mass scare story.There were probably high level government meetings about resurrecting one of the old faithfuls - you know them - imminent terrorist threat or something like that. When good old mother nature came to the rescue with swine flu.
Swine flu is deadly, as we have all been told. Well it is if you fall into one of the following categories:
- You are very young
- You are very old
- You live in a country without a good health care system
- You already have a serious condition affecting your immune system
The vast majority of the population thankfully don't fall into any of these categories so the comments about the shortage of Tamiflu (the wonder drug that prevents you getting this virus) are largely irrelevant. Even so the government has order tons more to be stockpiled - At least the poor drug manufacturers aren't going to be affected by this economic downturn.
I am getting a deja-vu thing going on here. Wasn't it only a couple of years ago we were told of a massive pandemic that was going to kill us all - oh yes it was avian flu. Lets look at what actually happened then, according to the WHO (World Health Organisation) the total number of cases - Worldwide - of avian flu in the Past 6 Years was 423 and of those 258 died. Not ONE of those cases was from the UK.
Cumulative Number of Confirmed Human Cases of Avian Influenza A/(H5N1) Reported to WHO
Going back a little further you will recall the SARS pandemic. If you look at the figures involved here you will see that there were 4288 cases worldwide (6 in the UK) and 251 deaths (again not one UK death).
Cumulative Number of Reported Probable Cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)
I am not saying that we should forget about the whole thing but we should keep the whole situation in proportion and not feed the greed of the large drug manufacturers by using our money (which government money is) to buy drugs that will never be used.
