HOW MANY DEAD?

           QUESTION, HOW MANY HAVE ARE DEAD FROM BF?         &nb sp; I HAVE BEEN ON THE FORUM FOR WEEKS NOW AND WHEN I GOT HERE THE DEATH TOL WAS 94, 95 FROM BF...BUT EVERY OTHER DAY OR SO, NEWS, 2 DEAD, 3 DEAD, 11 MONTH OLD DIES OF BF......WHY ARE'T THE NUMBERS GOING UP....DOES ANY ONE ELSE SEE THIS?        SUNSET

No way to tell.

Until the virus settles on its final genetic form, we won't know who will be susceptible, the morbidity rate, etc., etc.

Several issues at work here.

Firstly the WHO number of confirmed cases & deaths does go up. Here is an archive of their number for various countries, with dates of the WHO reports:

http://www.who.int/csr/disease/avian_influenza/country/en/in dex.html

Now the WHO numbers lag behind the totals that are reported in the press. The WHO always takes some days to add deaths, so a death announced in Indonesia in the media tomorrow will not be added to the WHO total for days.

Other organisations and the media are free to do their own calculations, so you ma hear the figure 175 cases and 95 deaths before the WHO total catches up and matches that.

THere are also a number of more controvertial theories/factors. Its important to note that the WHO totals are confirmed cases, so if there are any cases that are in doubt, they wont add them to the total. People may call that a conspiracy or whatever, but the WHO total only claims to be confirmed cases, they cant just add possible deaths to it without being sure.

So the issue really comes down to 'how can the world get better at confirming every case'? Its pretty clear that real cases have been missed, but nobody can say exactly how many. Some countries may have covered up sometimes, in which case there may be data that someone somewhere knows, but more often than not, cases are missed because people arent looking, arent doing enough different tests at the right time. There is also the possibility that some people get bird flu without getting very sick. Then there is the possibility that H5N1 can cause a range of symptoms thats making it be misdiagnosed as something else. These are all plausible theories, and we can guess about what events they may apply to, but we cant be sure. It therefore becomes nigh on impossible to come up with an alternative total that includes such outbreaks.

At the end of the day the total numbers arent going to match the actual reality, whatever we do, but a lot more could be done.

Never mind, I can live with the totals being a bit inaccurate, because really the exact numbers dont matter that much. What matters is when huge numbers of people are clearly getting ill. We wont need numbers to tell us when that happens, it will be obvious. What we do need is for better faster testing and a willingness to test for H5N1 in any large disease outbreak in humans, to stop misdiagnosis putting us in real peril.

The numbers are so comical that reporting them is just show us
How they think of us. You probably have more people in the world dieing from Sell phone use than from bird flu
we have 6 Billion people only hundred died from BF HA
sorry WHO is not telling