Scaremongering The Next Flu Pandemic

The United Nations health agency warned against “scaremongering” over an expected global flu pandemic, a day after one of its officials said it could claim 150 million lives.

Dick Thompson, spokesman for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) anti-flu operations, said it is nearly impossible to predict the death toll of a global crisis that experts fear could be fueled by Asia’s bird flu outbreak.

People should be wary of any figure they hear, because all are based on “guesswork,” he said.

…

Seasonal epidemics of flu in different regions of the world kill an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 people a year, according to the WHO.

But global pandemics, caused by new variants of the virus, claimed millions of lives in the last century.

Such outbreaks occur roughly every 40 years, and the last was in 1968, when the estimated toll was up to four million, Thompson said.

…

Although human-to-human transmission has been limited, experts fear that H5N1 could combine with common human flu viruses that spread easily.

Predicting exactly how to fight such a mutant strain is a tall order, Thompson said.

“We won’t know until this virus emerges,” he said.

When the next flu pandemic hits, will 5 million people die or will up to 150 million people die?

Like he said, we won’t know until this virus emerges.