re: #475 SixDegrees

Completely agree with this assessment. Current estimates are that the flu is all over Mexico; cases probably run well into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, already. The death rate shrinks into insignificance as a result. Even the death rate is extremely questionable; few, if any, of these cases have a definitive confirmation as having been caused by the flu. Although discretion may be the better part of valor in such cases, it also leads to wildly inflated mortality rates.

Real numbers will emerge over the next week or two, and there is every indication that the threat of this latest strain will actually be minute.

Here’s the most important part of her story that no one is being told:

A point repeatedly emphasized to the media yesterday by Dr. Anne Schuchat, Director for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, was that they couldn’t credibly say the cases being identified in the laboratory are indicative of a new situation. Cases identified with increased surveillance is not the same thing as actual increased incidents.

As she said, we might never have even known about this a few years ago because health departments weren’t testing for unusual strains of influenza viruses. They only recently stepped up laboratory capabilities and in 2007 launched a new reporting system that now makes it mandatory for state health departments to report the detection of untypable influenza strains during their routine influenza season surveillance. “Ten years ago we were not doing that, so we may be seeing something and actively investigating something that has happened many times before,” said Dr. Schuchat. So, we really cannot say that this is anything new.

All of the cases have been detected through routine surveillance for seasonal flu after state labs found strains they couldn’t type and sent the samples to them. “We are doing more testing now and looking more aggressively for unusual influenza strains,” she said. “So we haven’t seen this strain before, but we haven’t been looking as intensively as we are these days.” Now, they’re in an active investigation mode, she explained. So, each case that tests positive for swine influenza A (H1N1) “prompts a contact tracing investigation that is much more aggressive than we would do with a routine season influenza patient.”

Emphasis mine. Changes in protocol have resulted in increased numbers of finds. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a flu bug running around, but it also means that if such testing had not been in place, we probably never would have known about this. So the testing is good; we just need to take a deep breath and not freak out.