Bless you

The World Health Organisation (WHO) state that every year flu causes approximately three to five million cases of severe illness, and around 250,000 to 500,000 deaths.

It is important to point out that this figure is not for Swine Flu. The 250,000 to 500,000 deaths per year that we’re talking about here, is for everyday, regular, good old fashioned influenza, and this annual death count is referred to by WHO as a ’seasonal epidemic’.

How many people have died from Swine Flu? It is extremely difficult to find a concrete figure regarding this anywhere and when I tried to call WHO about the matter, all I got was cracklin… (oh dear). But on a serious note, the research that I have done into the global death toll of swine flu indicates that the virus has killed far less than a thousand people worldwide so far this year.

This all begs the question that if the standard seasonal epidemic of standard flu frequently tops half a million a year, why are the front pages of newspapers across the world implying that humanity is on the verge of being wiped out?

We can only presume that the answer is that fear sells. SARS sold newspapers, and Bird Flu sold newspapers, and both of these viruses (which were heralded by the media as the apocalypse) killed an absolute fraction of long established viruses such as TB and cholera.

The thing is though, people dying of TB and cholera isn’t newsworthy, it’s just an unfortunate fact of life. What makes a virus newsworthy seems to have less to do with the genuine threat which it poses, and more to do with whether or not people have heard of it before.

Now, faced with the aporkalypse, I’m confident that the human race will survive, and you don’t have to be psychic to predict that the next epidemic of media scaremongering is right around the corner.