Richard Erlich: Swine flu and other risks — by the numbers

Palin's last laugh
2:41 p.m.
‘With the help of Butler County United Way’
12:52 p.m.
Honoring his family
11/19/09
‘It’s about character’
11/19/09
You're in denial
11/18/09
> More opinion headlines

2:13 PM Friday, May 8, 2009

One good thing, anyway, will come from the swine flu epidemic of 2009: Americans will learn a basic statistic or two about “morbidity and mortality,” and maybe get familiar with the phrase “morbidity and mortality.”

According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, ordinary seasonal “influenza is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality” — sickness and death — in the United States, with the World Health Organization reporting that “there are approximately 25 (million) to 50 million U.S. cases per year, resulting in 150,000 hospitalizations and as many as 30,000 to 40,000 deaths.”

WHO tells us on their Web site that, “worldwide, these annual epidemics” of the flu “result in about three (million) to five million cases of severe illness, and about 250,000 to 500,000 deaths.”

And if you think WHO is part of some United Nations commie conspiracy, Fox News says “garden-variety strains” of flu “hospitalize 200,000 Americans and kill 36,000 every year.”

Know how many humans that sharks kill in an average year? According to a story in my local paper, “71 reported worldwide” for 2007, “up from 63 in 2006.” Want the record for “Jaws,” the super-scary great white shark? A 2001 article on irrational fears notes that “unprovoked great white shark attacks have claimed merely 67 lives worldwide since 1876.”

That’s where the expression “shark-attack story” comes from: scary stories about very horrible but extremely unlikely ways to die.

With luck, getting the flu stats drilled into our heads will help us put into perspective various kinds of “shark-attack” threats.

Literal shark attacks are an extreme example of media hype, but given their quiet coverage of “garden-variety” flu deaths, it’s clear that U.S. media have gone a long way down the shark-attack route, covering, say, anthrax attacks, or — for most civilians — terrorism generally.

We remember and should remember 2001, with nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11. But we should also remember that the global terrorist body count for all of the 1990s was under 3,000.

And more recently and more generally? Well, in a column of May 24, 2003, Gwynne Dyer talked of the preceding week, “In media terms” as “a terrorist blitz: 59 people killed in Chechnya on May 10; 34 dead in Saudi Arabia the following day; 16 more dead in Chechnya on May 13; a wave of terrorist bombings [...] in Pakistan on May 14; at least 41 deaths from last Friday’s bomb attacks in Morocco; and three Israelis killed on Saturday. It sounds like a lot. It’s not.”

It’s not because “around a million human beings die each week,” mostly “from natural causes.” The week leading up to Dyer’s column “was the worst for terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001, but only 153 people were killed. Last week, therefore, one in 7,000 of the deaths in the world was caused by terrorism.”

Terrorism is a threat to Americans; it is not in itself — so long as we don’t panic — an existential threat to America. And short of terrorists with nukes, Americans run only a slight risk from terrorists.

I picked terrorism for its relevance and capacity to provoke. My point is that when you get scary statistics, you need to ask of this or that body count: Well, is this a large number in the context of morbidity and mortality generally? Is this a significant risk relatively speaking?

To start with, is it a number to panic about relative to 36,000 dead in a pretty bad flu season in the USA? Dyer adds for context the statistics on major conventional wars — 19,240 British troops died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in World War I — and suggests that every now and then we should have headlines of “750 people dead of gunshot wounds in the United States since Monday” (we average some 30,000 gun deaths a year) or “Weekly traffic death toll in India tops 2,000.”

Sometimes we should be afraid and very afraid; more often, a little concern is appropriate.

I used to scuba dive, and the one time I bled in sea water, I discovered that I feared sharks deeply; but the serious danger to me wasn’t from sharks; it was the danger that I’d panic from my fear of sharks.

I flew to upstate New York shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, and did fear another terrorist attack. But I knew the numbers, and my shark fear ebbed as my bleeding stopped; and I was and remain more afraid of getting a respiratory infection from commercial plane flights than getting blown up.

As of now, every American should know from Fox and other media that we lose some 36,000 Americans a year from just flu and many more — and more young, strong and economically vital people — from other diseases. And America survives.

We should have a healthy fear of terrorists, but not an unhealthy dread. If seasonal flu doesn’t panic you, don’t panic over swine flu, and certainly keep your head over the range of sensationalized threats from shark attacks to anthrax.

Richard D. Erlich is professor emeritus in English from Miami University in Oxford. He is currently retired in Ventura C

nty, Calif.

Share this article

ADD COMMENT

Comments feed

If swine flu grows more virulent and returns in the fall along with seasonal flu, we SHOULD "be afraid, be very afraid." The Spanish Flu pandemic after World War I was deadly on a vast scale and a horror show even by the standards of World Wars.

(Hey, my submission was already too long, and I couldn't cover everything.)

RDE

Rich Erlich
1:09 PM, 5/10/2009

REPORT ABUSE

We welcome your comments. Please remember this is a public forum and behave appropriately. Your comments must conform to our visitor's agreement.