Swine flu 'less lethal than was feared'

[Cees Binkhorst]

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Nederland.

Groet / Cees

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/ferguswalsh/2009/12/swine_flu_less_lethal_than_was_feared.html
Swine flu 'less lethal than was feared'
Fergus Walsh | 15:01 UK time, Thursday, 10 December 2009

New research has estimated that there have been 26 deaths out of every
100,000 cases of swine flu in England.

Swine flu information leafletThe authors say this makes the first
pandemic of the 21st Century "considerably less lethal than was feared
in advance". No surprises there, but it is the first time we've had a
figure for death rates in this country.

The study, published online in the British Medical Journal was carried
out by a research team at the Department of Health.

It concludes that swine flu has a fatality rate of 0.026% or put another
away, about one death in every 3,800 people infected.

That would make it 10 times less lethal than flu pandemics in the 50s
and 60s and 100 times less dangerous than the pandemic of 1918-19.
So-called Spanish flu is thought to have killed at least 50 million
people, more than died in the World War I.

It's worth pointing out that all estimates of deaths from flu pandemics
are subject to very wide variation. Increases in fatality are usually
worked out more than a year later by analysing trends in death rates and
calculating the likely proportion due to flu.

This is the first time that individual deaths from a pandemic flu virus
have been counted. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
estimate for deaths in the United States is similar at 0.018%.

The Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson said improvements in
nutrition, housing and health care might explain some of the apparent
decrease in fatality from one pandemic to the next.

But even the comparatively low death rate of 0.026% may itself be a huge
overestimate. That's because huge numbers of those infected have
probably had swine flu without knowing it.

Recently the Health Protection Agency estimated that up to one in five
schoolchildren have had the virus, half of them without showing
symptoms.

Two thirds of those who died from swine flu would have been eligible for
vaccination and the authors say this demonstrates the importance of
immunising those at high risk of complications.

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