Niklas' blog

Thanks to Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet, this video simply illustrates how the swine flu hype-pandemic has affected us in comparison with a real pandemic, e.g. tuberculosis.

Note the news/death ratio that Rosling shows in the video, screen-shot above.

Bonus round: what’s a pandemic? From Wikipedia:

A pandemic [...] is an epidemic of infectious disease that is spreading through human populations across a large region; for instance a continent, or even worldwide.

OK, a pandemic is an epidemic that is geographically wide-spread. So, what’s an epidemic? From Wikipedia yet again:

In epidemiology, an epidemic [...] occurs when new cases of a certain disease, in a given human population, and during a given period, substantially exceed what is “expected,” based on recent experience (the number of new cases in the population during a specified period of time is called the “incidence rate”).

“Substantially exceeded what is ‘expected’”? Of course the expectation should ideally be issued by the authorities and then flow through the media, but as we all know, if it bleeds it leads, and as mass psychology suggest, people are prone to reacting by knee-jerking rather than applying rational thought, i.e. fact-checking.

Loads of people I know have visited their doctor to have an H1N1 vaccine injected, of which most have fallen sick for about a week afterwards, something they seem to have taken with glee in contrast with what could happen, should they fall prey to the evil swine flu! A suspicious part of me wonders how well said vaccine has been tested and what the long-term effects will be.