Gimme That Swine Flu!

The best public health involves neither vaccines nor quarantines

by Doug Collins 

As of July 3, 2009—fully three months into the outbreak of the new H1N1 “swine flu” strain—the World Health Organization (WHO) is reporting 382 confirmed worldwide deaths due to the swine flu (www.who.int/csr/don/2009_07_03/en/index.html). At that rate, there would be only about 1500 deaths in a year due to the much-feared virus.

Curiously, also according to the WHO, the three main seasonal flu strains—H3N2, old-fashioned H1N1, and type-B—cause 250,000 to 500,000 deaths a year globally.

Given that the normal three flu types apparently have a kill rate more than 100 times greater than swine flu, many people should question the news hype.

In Mexico, at the height of the scare in late April, officials reported some 159 suspected swine flu deaths, but it turned out only a handful of those were due to swine flu. A lesson should be learned by news readers: suspected cases in the early stages of a disease outbreak are typically overstated.

Skeptics should also take heart in their everyday experiences: the fact that my neighbor’s kid had a confirmed case (with nothing more than some sniffles and a mild fever), the star of Harry Potter had a confirmed case (he’ll be back on set shortly), and many of us have probably had it and don’t even know. Seems like almost all the people dying from this extremely mild flu are those that have serious underlying health issues, the same as for the normal flu strains.

Heck, I had a fever and some sniffles a months ago. Would I have gone to the doctor and let public health officials make a big deal out of nothing? No way.

In fact, I’m hoping it was swine flu that I had. If, as some health officials suggest, the new H1N1 strain could mutate into something more effective, then there’s a darn good chance that my body has developed immunity to it by contact with the pre-mutated strain. That’s a natural vaccine, which I’d guess is probably more effective than any swine flu vaccine they’ll come up with.

Think I’m crazy? Well, apparently the experts at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are crazy, too. They’re saying that older people seem to be immune to the new H1N1 strain due to past exposure to other H1N1 viruses (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFluNews/story?id=7647943&page=1).

Of course, you’ll never hear public health agencies (or their close cousins, pharmaceutical corporations) trumpet this finding very loudly. It might put them out of a job.

Moreover, the success rate of flu vaccines in the past has been... well, I don’t want to be impolite. Suffice it to say that I avoid them. And if you’re too young to remember the last swine flu scare in the 1970s, read about that virus and the considerably more fatal vaccine at www.capitalcentury.com/1976.html.

In fact, I’d guess the debacle of the swine flu vaccine in 1976 is perhaps the reason that public health officials have been trying so hard to steer people away from using the term “swine flu.” This will assist their PR campaign for selling a new “H1N1” vaccine to us in the fall.

Ineffective—and sometimes harmful—public health practices need to be replaced by natural, common sense. So if you’ve got the flu, please sneeze on me now. It’s probably the healthiest thing for me.•