Swine Flu

The Government need to re-evaluate their approach to the way they are offering guidance on the outbreak of swine flu, so much conflicting  advice  is out there that we do not know what to believe. Some of the figures out there appear to be plain old scaremongering, maybe  they are inflating figures to distract from other bad news like the return of dead 8 dead soldiers  from Afghanistan this week, or maybe that unemployment has hit 2.4 million this week up nearly 300,000 in the last three months. Whatever the reason they need to be more honest, all forecasts of doom are preceded with the word “could” for example 20,000 “could “ die, or half the population “could”  be infected, well of course they could, the same way that pigs “could “ fly. When you look at  hard facts Swine flu could really just be called flu, the symptoms are the same, the severity is the same,  the number of people that die each year from flu or from illness’s aggravated by flu  is around 7000, so far this current epidemic has claimed 29 lives, even the infected numbers are based on guesswork those numbers take into account calls to GP’s and national health lines from people panicked by the conflicting advice out there. I saw one report that said by the end of August as many as 100,000 people a day will come down with the virus, another that said one  in every 200 will die, both these were then qualified at the bottom with “these are not predictions but possible outcomes based on computer models” so until there really is something out there to back up the Governments line don’t believe everything you read.