I am instinctively sceptical about health scare stories, so have been watching the Swine Flu story with much suspicion. We are seldom reminded that it’s less serious than normal flu. Hysterically, Andy Burnham claims there could be up to 100,000 infections a day in Britain next month – the latest worldwide tally is 121,000. We are told how many die from swine flu, but not how many have also died from normal flu so we can put it in context (the DoH, remarkably, can’t tell me).
Proper diagnosis is not being done by our doctors. Virtually anyone with a summer cold is being told to stay at home for seven days – result! – and prescribed Tamiflu just in case. I went hunting for the normal flu figures, but found something else instead: that this is a London flu. The below graph is the latest national figures for “influenza-like symptoms” by region.
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