Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
THE SWINE FLU
NOVEL H1N1 INFLUENZA OF THE YEAR 2009 (Misnomer- Swine Flu) Prologue: I never wanted to write on this subject because information is readily available on TV but as usual, Media is creating panic in the mind of people by showing every death as breaking news. Abbreviation used: Novel H1N1 influenza = H1N1 flu = HNF Let us start with number of deaths per year due to various infectious diseases in the world. Infectious disease deaths in millions Pneumonia 4.18 Diarrhea 2.16 HIV 2.08 TB 1.46 Malaria 1.3 Seasonal flu 0.5 HNF 0.002 People can see that there is no comparison between deaths due to other infectious diseases and HNF. However, HNF is a caused by a new virus and therefore people do not have immunity against it and so some amount of concern is acceptable but the virus is having low virulence .However, winter is a season of […]
