|
|
|
|
beskeptigal
SFN Die Hard
USA
3834 Posts |
 Posted - 02/20/2006 : 15:37:48
|
For those of you reading the BAUT or Skepchick forums, I posted this there as well.
Last night, FOX news had a special on what would (will) happen when the next pandemic occurs. There was some good information, and it was a worthwhile special to put on. But they reinforced several myths and did a bit much on the sensationalizing.
Myth:
It's a big myth that if we have any pandemic the military is going to surround a city and lock people in and out. Yet FOX had to put that nonsense in there. They even contradicted it themselves when they showed that the disease would be in multiple cities at the same time.
Truth:
Any outbreak that is small is managed locally, by public health officials. People my be quarantined, and indeed there is a law allowing mandatory quarantine if ordered by the public health. Taiwan officials sealed a hospital during the SARS outbreak. It's a stretch that even that would happen here.
Why? Because an influenza pandemic, or anything else that included a very contagious disease requiring large scale isolation, would never be confined to any city by the time it was recognized. I've said this before, you might have local cops walling off the cities that weren't infected. The rest is purely Hollywood fiction. No wide spread highly infectious disease spreads outward from a single location like the growing red on the map in the movie Outbreak. Instead you'd have multiple sites of infection all over the world or at least widespread over much of the country all at the same time.
Pure media hype or reporter ignorance, take your pick.
Misleading information:
FOX claimed the 1976 swine flu vaccine killed more people than the disease and used a figure of the vaccine causing 30 some deaths.
Truth:
In 1976 an outbreak of swine flu, spread person to person in an Army barrack at Fort Dix infecting 230 soldiers with 13 hospitalized and two dying. Prior to and after the 1976 outbreak, most known cases of swine flu were like the avian flu today, a few people got infected directly from pigs but human to human transmission rarely occurred. It was also believed at the time that the 1918 flu pandemic was a swine flu and not an avian flu. We now know it was avian.
Given that information, a vaccine was developed and millions of doses given to millions of people. According to FOX, 30 some deaths were attributed to the vaccine that was given to millions of people. The 2 deaths from the flu outbreak at Fort Dix amounted to about a 1% death rate. Had the disease been allowed to spread first, then vaccinations begun, there would have been thousands of deaths. Hindsight shows the disease did not progress. The flu vaccine got a bad rap.
I'll be checking for the true fatality numbers from the vaccine. I haven't yet looked to see how accurate the FOX numbers were.
Of course, while pointing out the hindsight of the 1976 flu vaccine campaign, no mention was made of the average of 34,000 deaths per year in the USA alone from human flu viruses. And hundreds of thousands have died from flu since while avoiding the vaccine. They have the misconception flu vaccine is dangerous without noting the flu is significantly more dangerous.
|
|
|
HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 02/20/2006 : 15:46:02 [Permalink]
|
Thank you, B! This shows that Fox "News" is downright dangerous, and not just with their irresponsible political propaganda.
|
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Topic Locked
