The Expansionist

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Flu Info and Nonsense. In a column published today by the New York Post, a doctor (Marc K. Siegel) offers this interesting bit of information:

The killer is often not the flu itself, but the diseases that accompany it, such as pneumonia. And pneumonia can be prevented by the pneumonia vaccine, which is in ample supply this year, or treated with antibiotics. Without the flu shot, many doctors are remembering to offer the pneumonia shot to their high-risk patients, which may well be more life saving.

Sounds like good advice.
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Alas, he screws up his entire column with this bit of preposterous overstatement in his first paragraph:

THIS year's first flu-related death came not from the disease, but from an elderly woman who fell while waiting for the vaccine. Throughout history, panic has killed far more than the disease that causes it.

I don't know if "the disease that causes it" refers only to the flu or to any disease that has caused a panic, but in either case the statement is patently false. Consider this passage from the introduction to a PBS webpage:

no flu ever struck as fast, as hard, and with such lethal power as the 1918, or "Spanish Flu," which rivals the Black Death as the deadliest epidemic in history. To a world already ravaged by war, the 1918 pandemic was crippling; some 30 to 40 million people died worldwide, with the highest death rate occuring in young men and women. In the United States, 675,000 people died, including over 40,000 G.I.s -- 40 percent of all those who perished in World War I.

There is no way that panic caused more than 30 or 40 million deaths in 1918. And if the reference is to any disease, it is even more nonsensical, inasmuch as the Black Death killed a third of the population of Europe in the 14th Century.
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Dr. Siegel's careless statement thus approaches FDR's preposterous assertion that "We have nothing to fear but fear itself"! The United States was in the worst Depression of its entire history, with tens of millions of people unemployed and at the edge of starvation, and the planet was moving toward World War II, the greatest military calamity of all time, but we had "nothing to fear but fear itself"? I think not.
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(Responsive to "Flu Fears and Facts" by Marc K. Siegel, New York Post, October 20, 2004)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:46 PM

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