From the Health Sciences Institute
For most of 2009, it's been the Year of the Ox in China .
For everywhere else: Year of the Swine. Swine flu, that is. And what better place to start our year-end recap of the Top Outrages of 2009 than with the fearsome H1N1 "pandemic."
I put "pandemic" in quotes because (here's Outrage Number One) it would never have been a pandemic at all if World Health Organization officials hadn't actually changed their definition of the word.
Before May 2009, a pandemic required "enormous numbers of deaths and illness." Once those six words were removed from the definition, the pandemic was on! And so was the gold rush. Governments all over the world placed orders for hundreds of millions H1N1 vaccine doses.
Just two months later (Outrage Number Two), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised state health officials to do two things. 1) Stop testing patients for H1N1. 2) Stop counting cases of H1N1.
A CBS News reporter thought that was a bizarre move in the middle of a pandemic. So she asked CDC officials: Why stop testing and counting? The CDC response: No comment. So the reporter went state to state, checking on flu numbers and found that confirmed H1N1 cases accounted for only a small fraction of the total number of flu-like illnesses.
Gee. It's almost as if there were no pandemic at all!
As the year closes, the only thing we can say for sure about H1N1 is that this mild flu has sold a boatload of vaccines that have been slow to arrive.
One word: Outrageous!
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