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The Gap Between Stats and Understanding In Flu Cases
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Nov 24, 2007 04:17 AM
from the we-need-more-science dept.
from the we-need-more-science dept.
KentuckyFC writes "Bird flu gets all the headlines but ordinary flu kills several orders of magnitude more people each year and represents a significant threat to our society. The frightening thing about ordinary flu is how little we understand about how it spreads. According to a report at the physics arXiv blog, researchers trying to model this process say they still don't know some basic probabilities associated with infection (pdf, abstract). For instance, given that the disease has manifested itself clinically in an individual, what are the chances of that person dying? And if a virus can be caught from a number of different host species (as it might eventually be with bird flu) what is the probability of transmission?"
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Is ordinary flu that dangerous? (Score:5, Informative)
That is a the popular perception. But it does not reflect reality: death risk from ordinary flu is actually statistically negligible. See for example this page http://thinktwice.com/cdc_2001.pdf [thinktwice.com] taken from the CDC National Vital Statistics Report.
Yes, those are official statistics. Time to think twice. Yes, part of it is the good money made on all those flu shots. But that is only a small part of it. To learn more about the real reason, watch this talk by radiologist David Ayoub: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6890106663412840646 [google.com]. Hard to believe? Verify the sources, they check out. Welcome to the real world.
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don't let yourself be trapped inside the "real world" of yet another conspiracy theory. you might want read this and at least be open minded to the possibility that you are being misled by people who mean well, but are totally deluded.
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/default.asp?Display=124 [theness.com]
also this podcast has a good segment on it http://www.theskepticsguide.org/skeptics [theskepticsguide.org]
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Re:Is ordinary flu that dangerous? (Score:5, Informative)
Second, the data you referenced only used death as an end point. That is only one of several measures. For every death, the flu causes much more morbidity which is entirely ignored by you. It causes a huge numbers of hospitalizations and ICU stays which are incredibly expensive.
Third, very little money is made in vaccines. Primary care doctors are lucky if they don't loose money on vaccines. How do I know? I am a primary care doctor and its a wash between the cost of storing and purchasing them vs how much we get paid to give them. Manufactures almost have to be begged to make vaccines because there is little financial incentive to do so. Its not uncommon to have shortages occasionally because of this.
Forth, your referencing a radiologist to talk about an infectious disease / epidemiology problem. That's usually a red flag right there. For instance I know an orthopedic surgeon that argues quite well to the uneducated how evolution is genetically impossible. He's a doctor so the uneducated take his word and believe him. Problem is, he's a idiot outside orthopedics and anyone with half an education about genetics would butcher him. Another example would be this is like getting a plumbers opinion on what type of roof to put on your house. Would you do that?
Parent
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I did find this though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy [wikipedia.org]
This points to sources of the CDC saying there is no link, as does WHO and the Institute of Medicine. So if you know something those guys though feel free to link it.
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Here is a paper by David Ayoub http://www.jpands.org/vol11no2/ayoub.pdf [jpands.org] in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. I suggest you trace the references therein. For a good general overview of vaccine issues with many detailed source references, I can recommend this book http://astore.amazon.com/medical-bookstore-20/detail/1881217302 [amazon.com].
And heeere we go again! (Score:2)
Britain did a lo
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Hypothesis: because more and more the outliers of human behaviour are being medicalised, turned into a syndrome. Active kids? ADHD, put 'em on Ritalin. Slightly excentric with communications difficulties? Call 'em Aspergers or borderline autistic.
This is merely a thought fed by media attention on these 'syndromes'. I may be wrong, I haven't done a study, but I think it is worth looking at how our view on what constitutes normal behaviour ca
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Re:Is ordinary flu that dangerous? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Indeed, infectious diseases should be carefully researched and closely monitored. But does that warrant the scare mongering enacted in the public media concerning flu and bird flu when the actual risk is very very low in comparison to other common risks? And does that low risk warrant the side effects and cost of all those yearly flu shots people are given?
Why not verify the data that is supposed to show tha
Vaccines are not snake oil (Score:5, Insightful)
You give someone a vaccine, they get the antibodies for the virus they didn't have before. You can see them in your blood. How do you think this stuff works?
This isn't saying anything as to whether or not the flu shot should be a required vaccine or not, IMO NO vaccine should be required by law, but up to the parent. And I have never gotten a flu shot in my life and I likely never will until I am 70 and at risk, because other wise it is just fear-mongering nonsense (the flu is not going to kill me, a healthy 28 year old. At worst I will get a 2 week paid vacation).
As for the video and the claims of vaccine causing autism in some? May or may not be true. IMO it is not the issue. Think of how many times a child cuts themselves on metal each year. The likelihood of them getting a SERIOUS case of tennis from these injuries far exceeds the likelihood of them acquiring autism.
There is a degree of risk in almost every treatment in modern science. You go into routine surgery to get your appendix removed, you might die from the anesthetic. But the risk of dying is MUCH HIGHER without treatment. No different than many vaccines - the risk of death from the disease is much higher than any risk of autism. Nearly ever kid in the US gets a huge vaccine regiment, hardly any have autism. To me, that makes the probability pretty small. Much smaller than the odds of dying from any of these eliminated diseases used to be.
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Yeah, I had a bad case of Navratilova last year. Almost as bad as that case of Hingis my friend had.
Wait, tennis?
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Oh really? How exactly do you prove something "scientifically" without analyzing data? And how do we analyze data? Oh damn... there's that nasty "statistics" again...
Lockjaw? (Score:2)
Think of how many times a child cuts themselves on metal each year. The likelihood of them getting a SERIOUS case of tennis from these injuries far exceeds the likelihood of them acquiring autism.
Far? My sources say near. We were talking about vaccines, so I'll assume that by "tennis" you mean "tetanus" and not "lawn tennis" or "tetris" [pineight.com]. Wikipedia reports one million cases of tetanus per year [wikipedia.org]. Significant autism spectrum characteristics (e.g. anywhere from Asperger syndrome to full-blown autism) may occur in up to six of every 1000 people. Given 134 million babies per year [wikipedia.org], that's not quite a million, but it's close.
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Basically what you are saying is that even WITH vaccination programs the number of people who get tetanus is STILL HIGHER than the number of people who get autism. If anything you are just re-enforcing my argument.
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Smallpox? Polio? Have you totally taken leave of your senses? If you want to express doubts about the efficacy and safety of some vaccines, be my guest. You may well be right about many of them. But keep some sense of proportion, quit telling others (inc
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It's not the shot themeselves. (Score:3, Interesting)
One doesn't develop systematically antibodies against everything that gots injected under the skin. How otherwise would you explain that no reaction happen (most of the time) following tatoos ? That people who develop antibodies against bioengineered drugs only develop them over time (and not right at the first exposure) ?
For the white cells to react, the intruder must be flagged as something worthy of a reaction, otherwise th
Odd (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing like that even enters into their paper, so pardon me for finding it a bit one-sided approach.
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The problem (Score:1)
The media is unfortunately oblivious to the reality of virology; announcing that the bird flu or SARS or some other pandemic will decimate the population in the near future
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Maybe PR in the field of science needs a little sprucing up.
how about doing what nature intended instead (Score:4, Insightful)
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As far as being "maladapted," it depends on how you want to look at it. All species will reproduce until they come up against the limits of the resources. Other animals don't reach equilibrium with the earth because they're smarter,
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The WWI era pandemic was an influenza virus pandemic and antibiotics do not affect it. People who think that antibiotics work against the flu are part of why they become less effective every day.
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Flu vaccine *does* let humans adapt to nature. (Score:5, Informative)
Vaccination stimulates the human species' [no need for "s" after the apostrophe] immune system by exposing it to a safe version of the pathogen. In this way the immune system continues to "adapt for the flu", exactly as you had hoped, and in no way short-circuits the continued adaptation. As the influenza virus mutates, so does the vaccination, and each year the scientists try to figure out which strain of flu to protect against. (One year they guessed wrong, and the flu vaccine ended up next to useless as it protected against a strain of flu that only appeared in a small minority of people.)
Even for other vaccinations such as TdaP (tetanus, diphtheria, acellular pertussis) which is given only every ten years, vaccinations don't interfere with adaptation. The special case you may be thinking of is with smallpox, which was completely eradicated to the point that there is no further need for vaccination. That is not interference with adaptation, since:
- any reintroduction of smallpox is by artificial means, so in any case adaptation has nothing to do with it
- it's not worthwhile continuing to administer smallpox vaccine to let the immune system "adapt" to a potential smallpox outbreak, since the smallpox vaccine itself has a number of significant side effects. I myself was offered the smallpox vaccine shortly after the Sept11 incidents, and there was a non-negligible chance of serious illness including hospitalization and, by extension, death. (I did accept, but the threat level then decreased and it was no longer considered necessary.)
- if smallpox were to return due to natural circumstances rather than some human reintroducing the locked-up version, it would evolve from an existing virus in the wild, and vaccinations would play no part in whether the human immune system adapted
- Letting the human immune system adapt doesn't work all that well. SARS is an example of a virus for which we don't have a vaccine, and it had a mortality rate approaching 10%. That sucks. No antibiotics or other antimicrobial drugs, either, so you can't blame it on that.
I don't know if you're actually referring to the use of antibiotics, where pathogens do evolve against a fixed, unchanging drug molecule, but there are certainly advantages to having antibiotics, too, just as there are appropriate circumstances for sterilizing medical instruments or wearing disposable gloves. Nowadays we can treat skin cancer by a simple office procedure, for which the risk is negligible. Can you imagine if we didn't use sterile instruments, or if the doctor didn't wear sterile gloves, or we couldn't treat a surgical wound infection with antibiotics?Be careful not to confuse excessive anti-exposure measures with vaccination, which takes leverages rather than suppresses the immune system.
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Re:how about doing what nature intended instead (Score:4, Interesting)
With respect to the bird flu (being mentioned a lot in the replies), one of the best observations I have heard is that the real bird flu threat is the one you contract from KFC and McDonalds Chicken Nuggets, et al. Heart disease and obesity. That probably kills far more than all influenzas and pneumonias in the U.S. and Canada each year.
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I've always pondered that getting a flu shot every year is exercising your immune system. Certainly, I don't take it as obvious that if you get the flu shot and are later exposed to the real virus that something magic happened and your immune system didn't get to hammer on
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I wouldn't want to live in a worl like that, neither would most people. That's basic human compassion. Good riddance to evolution -- our future is in our own hands now, and we have to be smart
Re:how about doing what nature intended instead (Score:4, Insightful)
That sounds great, but adaptation at the level of a species as we understand it happens through evolution. To clarify, you're basically saying, "Let the weak die (of pneumonia and complications) and the strong survive." If you believe that, perhaps by your logic we really should refrain from vaccinating kids. If they die young before reproducing, then evolution has been served. With luck, in about 20 generations we may see some difference, although we're talking about random processes (i.e. there's no guarantee).
But the old are past child-bearing age. They've passed on their genes or they haven't. How is the species to be served by their suffering? Personally, comments like the quote sound more like pseudo-science than reasonable argument. It seems like wisdom to say we meddle too much until it is your precious 3-year-old daughter in the intensive care unit.
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American Newsspeak in Action (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you scared yet?
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Page rank up! (Score:2)
fears seem well placed (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, things are much worse now (Score:2, Interesting)
Nope (Score:2)
"Bird flu gets all the headlines but ordinary flu kills several orders of magnitude more people each year and represents a significant threat to our society.
Not really. The regular flu is a fairly known quantity, kills off a few with poor immune system and may be a threat to the individual dying but isn't a threat to society at all. On the other hand, a powerful new pandemic (remember, disease now travels at airplane speed) can kill off a lot of healthy young people, cause general panic and really threaten society. To evaluate the threat to society, you have to be a bit of a cynic and ask "Would society keep going as before?". And yes, it does.
The hype is somewhat justified (Score:2)
I think the question is not is bird flu more dangerous than normal flu, but what will happen if bird flu infects people and then mutates.
Normal human strains of flu have been around for a long time, sometime mutates into something really bad. We have had a lot of experience of this, and there are a lot of infection models.
We know nothing of what will happen if bird flu gets into humans and mutates because it hasn't yet happened (although there is con
Paranoia (Score:2)
When I asked people why, their excuses were: they saw something on the Internet about how vaccines makes you sick, it will give you the Flu, they want their body to fight it naturally, there's mercury in it. I was amazed at the level of paranoia.
One woman had a valid excuse she lost her hea
one thing everyone forgets (Score:2)
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What's needed is more data, not more models.