Chill Out: It's The Flu, Not The Plague By: Mark W Adams

Close The Borders!!

Buy Duck Tape and Stay In Your Safe Room!

Stock Up on Ammo and Surgical Masks!

DON'T KISS PIGS!!!!!!

Worldwide, the annual death toll from the [plain old "regular"] flu is estimated to be between 250,000 and 500,000.

Twice in as many days, the acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control noted that the U.S. averages about 36,000 annual deaths from seasonal flu every year -- the kind of flu you've had before and lived to complain about. 98 Americans die of "normal" influenza every day -- day after day.

Tragic that it is for 150 people to have died so far from this H1N1 "swine" flu strain, let's say the Mexico outbreak ends up ten times worse than it is now, resulting in 1,500 total deaths. Let's also reduce the affected population to just the greater Mexico City population -- The largest metro area in the western hemisphere at 22 million -- which might see as many as 40% catching this bug according to one of the latest alarmist headlines.

So, instead of taking the entire Mexican population of 111 million seeing only 150 deaths, let's look at a worse-case/inflated situation of 1,500 deaths among 22 million people. That's somewhere in the range of 0.007% mortality rate assuming a limited population and increase in deaths from this outbreak rising ten-fold.

Compare that 0.007% mortality rate to the plain old flu in the United States with her 36,000 annual flu deaths among a 306 million population. It works out 0.012% mortality rate, or almost twice what we could expect if the Mexico outbreak is ten-times worse than now reported.

That this is a grossly inflated estimate is nicely illustrated by the annual number of Mexican AIDs deaths the CIA Factbook reports, 11,000, or 73 times the 150 deaths the H1N1 flu strain has killed to date. Last I heard, AIDs is a lot more deadly and a lot harder to transmit than any sort of flu.

I think we're going to be okay folks. I'd be more worried about drinking the water in Mexico than the flu-carrying islamo-bioterror invasion. Unless of course I watched Glenn Beck without being reduced to fits of laughter.