Swine Flu Mortality

Great job as all your illustrations.
Made an account on flickr to tell you that :)

Hallo, ich bin der Administrator der Gruppe Design Perverts, und wir würden uns freuen, wenn Du dies zu unserer Gruppe hinzufügen würdest.

nategonz (28 months ago | reply)

i have swine flu :(

Alan De Smet (28 months ago | reply)

"This should make you think!" Think that it's a serious disease with a real potential to become a widespread danger causing massive deaths? Think that health care workers and people working with particularly at-risk populations should get flu shots? Think that scientists and doctors are genuinely interested in protecting themselves and others? Think that as a society we have a regrettable willingness to trust quacks and conspiracy theorists as much as we trust scientists? Think that a video using scare tactics and omitting relevant information is shameful? Think that anyone taking David Icke, a man who believes that reptile people rule the world, seriously has their own problems.

Yeah, I think those things.

There are risks to the H1N1 flu vaccine. It may be a mistake. But there is no conspiracy, no matter how much you passively aggressively insinuate it is.

Michæl Paukner (28 months ago | reply)

I see - that's a hot topic. Ok, maybe i shouldn't have called it "conspiracy" and I shouldn't have linked to Mr. David Icke, as I myself don't believe some things he's telling. I put that away to avoid discussions about this guy. I'm neither a scientist nor a conspiracy theorist. I just present some numbers and people can think for themselves. Peace.

fortress letterpress (28 months ago | reply)

Bacon fever! What a great way to distract silly humans and cause paranoia around the globe.

christian anderl (28 months ago | reply)

@alan de smet - i don´t need any conspiracy to know that the pharma industry ist just another industry. goal: profit. and there are far enough examples appearing in the last years, where pharma industry showed up its real face. trust them? without any doubt? no, i won´t. swineflu and potential? maybe ... maybe not. who knows right now... you? i don´t.

OscarFalcon (28 months ago | reply)

Fantastic Graphic, very to the point.

isshica.sharma (28 months ago | reply)

Nice work it is very sad to see so much deaths in 300 day.

isshica.sharma (28 months ago | reply)

check out some funny images

slack---line (28 months ago | reply)

Great graphic, puts things into perspective nicely.

I think about how little testing the vaccine that these big pharmaceutical companies are churning out at massive profits has had. Usually it takes about 10 years for a new drug to be developed and undergo all the appropriate clinical trails. Not so for the current vaccine, and for all you, I or anyone else knows the risks of using the vaccine may be just as great as those posed by the flu virus itself.

Further since its a virus it mutates very quickly, and by putting selection pressure on the virus by using vaccines it is simply promoting the rate at which a more virulent strain will appear.

--
Seen in my contacts' photos. (?)

trainwrecka (28 months ago | reply)

Time is a conveyor belt of corpses. 10 out of 10 people will die. Find purpose for the small amount of time God has blessed you with.

bhartzer (28 months ago | reply)

it is kind of interesting that it's up and down, perhaps there are other issues at stake here causing it.

woofytexan (28 months ago | reply)

I would like to see you update it with influenza numbers. According to the CDC in the US, ~36k will die from influenza this ear. WHO (World Health Organization) does not have an estimate but states "We know the worldwide death toll exceeds a few hundred thousand people a year, but even in developed countries the numbers are uncertain, because medical authorities don't usually verify who actually died of influenza and who died of a flu-like illness."

z e r o s t u d i o (28 months ago | reply)

Complete propaganda - you work for the Pharmaceuticals?

docjenn (28 months ago | reply)

I would like to point out that the Swine Flu is the only cause of death on your chart that can be prevented by an effective vaccine.

(maybe certain forms of viral meningitis, but meningitis in general is too vague)

There is additive free vaccine available. This is prepared by a different method than the vax in the 70s. Don't let the anti-vaccine movement lie to you. The shot is an inactivated virus preparation so you cant get the swine flu from the vaccine. If you do get swine flu, it is more likely that you just picked it up before you came to get your shot since is all over the country right now.

zkeletenz (28 months ago | reply)

Nice chart. It would be even better if you did one that compared deaths at the same time period after emergence for all of the communicable diseases (probably best as a percentage of world population, so it is apples-to-apples, rather than raw numbers, which depend on population at that point in time.) Of course, even that isn't a perfect indicator of pandemic risk because we have better medical response and an effective vaccine now, unlike when the others emerged. But, I suppose, we have more infective risk too (more international travel, etc.)

tobybear (28 months ago | reply)

Excellent Infographic.

Nicely done - I commend you!

These comments can become a repository for suggestions for improvements to the graph and that should not overshadow the excellence of what you've created :-)

Having said that, as a much more difficult project it would be interesting if someone were to create a graph that showed these figures in relation to the amount of news coverage the various fatality types attract.

Again - thanks for this superb graph.

andysandyrb67 (28 months ago | reply)

I think your efforts have thrown the media bulshit into sharp relief. We can see quite clearly that swine flu is not the pandemic it has been trumpeted as. The drugs companies lie to the governments and they being stupid, panicky and gullible believe them. They then set in motion procedures to convince us.
Ignore the hype, live as healthily as you can, enjoy your time here and try to help others to enjoy it too.

pfile (28 months ago | reply)

"living as healthily as you can" includes getting vaccinated for preventable communicable diseases. no pharma company is getting rich making flu vaccines. they get rich making lipitor and other random drugs that counteract our crappy lifestyles.

it's most certainly a pandemic. a virus does not have to kill people to be qualified as a pandemic. it simply means that everyone is getting the disease.

doesn't anyone read history books? the spanish flu killed 50 million people worldwide. if there was such a thing as flu vaccine then maybe all those lives could have been saved. we're just lucky that H1N1 is not as deadly as that flu.

read this article, it's fantastic.

www.newscientist.com/article/dn18063-timeline -the-secret-...

elvishent (28 months ago | reply)

This is a total fail!
Tell me how Swine flew compares to non communal deaths or injuries. They have nothing in common. Non communal deaths and injuries are based on ther person health, stupidity and heridability. Im not gonna get cancer if i touch someone.

You cant even relate to communal disease. Your major flaw in this is that most of the communal disease you have are long term. The people who died from it had is for a while - more than 300 days Also, these people who died mostly live in 3rd world countries, poor places.
Example:
5800 people GOT the diease and died in your 300 days span.
If you got aids the same day someone got the swine flu, you would live WAYYY LONGER than them ( more than 300 days).

If you are going to compare a flu, compare it with other flu's during a period where there was no vaccine (since the vaccine just rolled in, you cant assume everyone has it and immune to it). Lets look at the bubonic plague in the 1300's. the popluation was roughly 300million, 75million people died within the 6 year time frame = 35,000 people per day! This was in the time when they didnt know about how these disease spread.

you should be scared. anyone can get it whether by air particulates or by contact.

Adam Graham (28 months ago | reply)

I love information and infographics. The piece of information that I think may be missing here though is the number of swine flu deaths versus deaths from the swine flu vaccine.

The other important thing to note is that many of those populations that are cited haven't had h1n1 through their normal flu season yet.

@docjenn Excellent point.

ahmadtx (28 months ago | reply)

1st time logging into Flickr just to tell you this is awesome. Wished you had regular flu on there as well. Excellent illustration.

niciza (28 months ago | reply)

I'm sorry but at least one element of this is wildly inaccurate. The creator says "151,017" people died in wars in the last 300 days.

In JUST the Congo War in Northeast Congo approx 45,000 people are dying each MONTH. This means in that conflict alone approx. 450,000 people have died in the last 10 months. Add in every other world conflict like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. and the numbers get even higher.

That's not just inaccurate, that's wildly inaccurate.

Source: www.enoughproject.org/conflict_areas/eastern_ congo

in4m8ionman (28 months ago | reply)

Such Bull Shit - if anyone thinks that 50 MILLION people are going to die from this lame non-event than they have much worse problems than Swine Flu.

pfile (28 months ago | reply)

i didnt say 50 million people are going to die from this. i said that killer flu pandemics are REAL and have happened in the past, if everyone takes this ridiculous antivax/paranoid attitude the next time we have a "real" pandemic, then loads of people are going to die. frankly, i don't care if you die because of your own stupidity, but i care if others die because you refused to be vaccinated and transmit the disease to them.

fran6co (28 months ago | reply)

This graphic really puts things in perspective. I'd like to see a version where it goes from the largest to the smallest, all reasons combined. Also, regular flu would be a nice addition.

@pfile well, actually there WAS a flu vaccine that was given to American troops right before they went to war in Spain in 1918. This is common knowledge. Some people even have the theory that it's that vaccine, which weakened the soldiers' immune systems, combined with the cramped living conditions, and the stress of war, that helped spread it all over Europe. Maybe YOU should read a history book.

Also, although it may be more lucrative to give a cholesterol pill to sick patients for 10 years (and NOT teach them how to feed themselves properly), there are a LOT of people making a FORTUNE with the vaccines. Even the US Govt, which charges an Excise tax of 75 cents for EACH DOSE. Now let's see: if half of the US population gets 2 doses (recommended), that's a cool 225 million dollars, just in the US, just for the tax. Which is peanuts when you realize that, as far as I can tell, it costs between 10 an 30 dollars to administer said shot. So let's say a median price of 20 dollars, for half the population of the US?

Six. Billion. Dollars.

And that is just one country.

pfile (28 months ago | reply)

you sure put me in my place. thanks. lets not vaccinate anyone. you'd probably not exist, but hey. you are completely self-reliant and never needed anyone or anything's help to survive.

pfile (28 months ago | reply)

of the $6B that the feds spent, supposedly only 75% was for the vaccine, needles, syringes and tamiflu. lets be generous and say that 75% of that was for the drugs. so the pharma companies got $3.4B. how much did they spend to make the vaccine? who knows, but it was not free. lets give them generous profit margins of 80%. they made $2.7B in profit. on a one-time event.

global sales of lipitor were almost $13B in 2007 alone. given the same margins, their profit was $10.5B. so what's a better use of the drug manufacturer's production capacity, a drug that people buy every year, or a vaccine that is needed once? yes, we have a for-profit drug/health-care system. does that mean that everything they do is some kind of conspiracy to make people sick so they can then cure them? that's the implication of the antivaxers.

i admit that i had not researched the 1918 vaccine. however, clearly the vaccine they had was completely ineffective. not surprising, since the 1918 vaccine was not a vaccine as we know it today. they had no knowledge of DNA, or viruses, or epidemiology. but what's the point? are you saying people should be skeptical of modern vaccines because someone took a total shot in the dark almost 100 years ago and failed? you think that the 1918 flu pandemic would not have been a big deal without the "vaccine"? then how about all those viral infections like smallpox or polio that used to kill and cripple children regularly before we almost completely eradicated those diseases with vaccines? should we have not developed those vaccines because someone made a profit selling them? what about the 1957 and 1968 flu outbreaks? were those not real? ~2.5M people died in those outbreaks.

its funny to me. if the government just shrugged their shoulders and people started dying en masse, everyone would be up in arms. but since they had to start planning for the H1N1 winter assault months before they knew if it would kill people wholesale, they could not take a "wait-and-see" attitude. so they went ahead and ordered the vaccine, and now they're damned for spending $6B "unnecessarily." i'd rather mistakenly spend $6B of my tax dollars on this than have millions of americans dying. i'll trade 20 days of the iraq war for the insurance that this represents.

vaccines, modern knowledge of nutrition, petroleum-powered agriculture and more generally technology are the reason there are 6B+ humans alive today. without these advances its very likely that neither you nor i would even exist. it's fine if you are against modern technology, but just keep in mind the consequences of not having it. its not just "everyone else" that gets to go away, it's you too.

unimatrixZxero (28 months ago | reply)

Carebears FTW.

Nice chart. I love how it puts things into perspective.

Drive safely everybody.

bodhisbuddy (28 months ago | reply)

Nice picture. What is the source for your numbers. I'm very curious.

Michæl Paukner (28 months ago | reply)

the data is from www.poodwaddle.com/clocks2.htm, which uses the death stats from the WHO: www.who.int/research/en/

grapplica (28 months ago | reply)

Beat the swine flu, learn the airshake on airshake.be/

chilsta (28 months ago | reply)

Why is the red line so much thinner than the white ones?

D. Shaw (28 months ago | reply)

Beautiful info graphic.

countryboy1949 (28 months ago | reply)

It's a disgrace that the US government is hyping up this H1N1 virus when in actuality it is milder than regular flu. Finland has downgraded from level 6, the UK has reduced their predicted deaths from H1N1 by 2/3, Australia has just finished their flu season with 186 deaths which is far short of the 3,000 predicted. Here in the US we have 36,000 deaths annually from the regular seasonal flu according to the CDC. So why is there an emergency in the US with H1N1 and no other country in the world? As a matter of fact this H1N1 virus is mild in all countries worldwide. A recent CBS report shows the H1N1 statistics are highly overestimated. Most of the tests run for H1N1 come back negative. There is no emergency here except in Washington,D.C. and at the pharmaceutical companies who are wanting record sales.

bodhisbuddy (28 months ago | reply)

Here's the thing countryboy,
When you have a genetic shift as in the case here, you don't have the luxury of predicting the morbidity/mortality very well.
It's very easy to sit here and say oh, big pharma this and big govt. that, but really...
It just doesn't make sense.

Von niuk (28 months ago | reply)

Your work is amazing ! really impressive.

JTompkins999 (28 months ago | reply)

This is a very pretty picture used to present some very misleading information.

1. The first case of H1N1 occurred on April 2, with the first death on April 12. This is approximately 200 days ago. All your other stats are inflated by a third.

2. H1N1 can affect the young and healthy, not just people with poor determinants of health. Potential years of life lost would be a better measure.

3. Other diseases had prevalent cases before Jan 2009 (people were already sick). All cases of H1N1 are new cases and everyone dying did not have the disease before last year.

4. Influenza occurs in waves. In 1918, the second wave of the pandemic had a five fold greater mortality than the first wave (at least in the UK). Places such as Western Samoa saw mortality rates greater than 23%. H1N1 could display similar adaptations to the host, resulting in higher mortality rates during the next wave.

5. When the unvaccinated get sick it places a greater burden on the healthcare system. People with preventable H1N1 take resources away from people with unpreventable diseases who need them. If healthcare workers are infected, it reduces manpower and the ability to treat people with other conditions. Consider also the cost of treating the unvaccinated when they get sick, compared to the cost of the vaccine.

Bottom line: Ask your doctor about the facts regarding H1N1 vaccination. Don't make decisions regarding your health based on a pretty picture!

capnsnappa (28 months ago | reply)

I don't know if it is sad or funny to see that people are such tools that they buy into any big media scare campaign and run right down to fill the next big company's ceo's pockets for them and bring their own shovelo to do it with. Time and time again it has been shown that big companies use the news media for their advertisment campaigns and time and time again everyone runs out and helps with the next campaign. I would be more scared to drive down to the clinic to get a shot than I would be of the piggy flu according to these statistics, trusting that they are correct because I do not feel like looking them up. And all the while people sit on the couch and watch the fear news u.s.a and get scared about 6,000 deaths in 300 days and the whole time they are eating bad food and some are smoking and they are actually worried about the piggy flu. Give me a break. This is just the next thing to make us forget that we are sitting on the couch eating too much bad food and smoking $5.00 packs of cigarettes adding to that megu huge number associated with heart disease. Whatever, I am going to get a sandwich and have a smoke, see you tools later.

capnsnappa (28 months ago | reply)

P.S. Knowledge is the best form of protection in cases like this. Ask your doctor what should your concerns be regarding vaccination and do your own research, you are sitting in front of the best research tool ever created, use it, make a decision, and live with the consequences.

Ihatewetsocks (28 months ago | reply)

Taлya (28 months ago | reply)

my my, hot topic indeed... the views for this are quite something!
The comments are as interesting as the graphics...
So much fear mongering going on, at all levels of our culture - it's really quite pathetic.

tukozaki (28 months ago | reply)

Excellent job Michael!
I've been looking for such stats for some time, thanks very much :)

turedzky (28 months ago | reply)

great!

Tomathon (28 months ago | reply)

Brilliant graphic. It still amazes me how stupid otherwise smart people can be. There's so much to be angry ( and active) about in the world, and yet people in the US are outraged about flu vaccine, Obama's birth certificate, and what celebrity is sleeping with whom.

sam_ (28 months ago | reply)

Well done

Jeff McGrath (28 months ago | reply)

Interesting, but poorly done.

Deaths are not the concern w/ the H1N1 virus.

I'd go into it more.... but don't have the time.

riffsyphon1024 (28 months ago | reply)

Regardless of what stats are used here to make the statement, it does show that there's much panic involved.

KAZVorpal (28 months ago | reply)

Alan, and anyone else foolish enough to try to defend the swine flu scare:

Swine flu has ZERO chance of becoming a dangerous epidemic.

In fact, swine flu has ONE THIRD the mortality rate of the COMMON flu.

And that's just counting hospitalized cases. In fact, most people never even realize they HAVE swine flu, because it's normally so mild.

In almost every way, the world is better off with h1n1 novel, this year, than if they'd simply had a common flu outbreak. Fewer people will die, and more people will end up with a stronger immunity to the flu in general.

The entire scare belies the statistics, and always had.

It may not be a conspiracy...but if not, it's a perfect example of how much more harm than good government bureaucracies are.

For example, the CDC and NIH exaggerate the risk of some disease, EVERY YEAR, in order to pad their wasteful, counter-productive budgets.

Go through their budget requests for the past decade. You will see avian flu, SARS, west nile, and swine flu all exaggerated greatly, in every case even statistics existing at the time of the request having made it clear that there was no serious threat.

They are thieves, which is what socialism breeds.

JThomkins:

No, it is VACCINATED people who place an unnecessary burden on the health care system. They end up with weaker immune systems than people who allow themselves to occasionally catch the relatively harmless ailments for real.

It's one thing to vaccinate yourself against smallpox, back when that was a truly deadly disease. It's another entirely to be a strong, fit person without an autoimmune disease and vaccinate yourself against something like the swine flu, or even common flu.

It's not only cowardly, but leaves you vulnerable to the flu, because you are only immunized against a tiny fraction of all possible strains, meanwhile your immune system is atrophied by lack of practice.

Better to get the swine flu, or even the more dangerous common flu, once in a while, and therefore be healthier overall.

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Swine Flu Mortality

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