Gert van der Hoek
In Memoriam - Editor, Senior Moderator
Swine Flu: 9 deaths to date in Australia = 45,000 cases?
Posted July 1st, 2009 by Mick
Today a three year old boy has died of H1N1 (known as Swine Flu). This brings the total number of deaths in Australia to nine. I wonder whether, had the Australian government taken better precautions, these nine people may not have died. It could be that the ordinary influenza would have killed them as all of them had health problems.
What concerns me is that health authorities are no longer counting flu victims and are no longer testing for Swine Flu. This leaves us all in the dark as to where Swine Flu is striking, how many people are sick, how many are in intensive care, what percentage are contracting pneumonia (which, if viral, could well be fatal even to a healthy person).
People have said to me, "The swine flu epidemic is dying down", but as there have been 9 deaths, it certainly isn't. We are just being fooled into believing it is no longer a problem.
In the beginning, if there was a swine flu case in a school, that school was closed for a few days. This may well have saved lives. No-one can be sure of the state of immunity of any given person at any given time. There was talk of public events such as football matches and concerts being cancelled.
Cruise ships were quarantined. I think the government must have decided that the cost to the economy was so great it wasn't worth the trouble. I think our government may be exposing many vulnerable people to a deadly disease which could kill them.
You might not think so until your grandmother or other relative dies of H1N1. It seems to me it is a more virulent and more highly infectious disease than the 'normal' type of flu. As well, few people have resistance to it: only those who were exposed to outbreaks in the 1930s and 1950s. It also seems, from all reports, to attack the person within 1 or 2 days of contact with an infected person.
This is what happened to my friend's son.
He knows who he was exposed to and he knows when. Within two days he felt like he was dying, with some kind of weird sensation of alteration of consciousness as well as the normal flu-like symptoms of pains in the joints and chills.
This friend I was talking about above, took his teenage son to a 'Flu Clinic' at a public hospital 'somewhere in NSW' yesterday. The triage nurse saw the boy right away - which was good, considering the waiting room was full and also contained a man with severe chest pains who believed he was having a heart attack and who was being ignored. Not so good for him.
The nurse confirmed he had some kind of flu and gave him a mask to wear. The boy's father asked if he would be tested for Swine Flu. The nurse's response was "No, we only test people who have actually died from flu now. The government can't afford to test everyone." When asked about Tamiflu, given the boy has asthma, the answer was no, it's too expensive to hand out willy nilly.
The boy and his father were then asked to sit in the waiting room for 2 hours and wait for a doctor. They declined.
I hope some people reading this will learn from this experience: even though public hospitals have been advertising their swine flu clinics, if you go there, you won't be tested, and you probably won't get Tamiflu, though you might get a prescription for antibiotics if you wait a few hours and if the doctor suspects your chest infection is bacterial.
What happened to the idea of people quarantining themselves at least voluntarily when they have swine flu? Of course now, they are never going to be able to find out if it's Influenza A, H1N1 or maybe just a bad cold.
On my calculations, if 9 people have died, then if .05% of H1N1 victims are dying, 18,000 Australians have had Swine Flu this week. If it is .02%, then 45,000 Australians have had Swine Flu during the past seven days.
The percentages seem to vary depending on where you look. As for the claimed 36,000 deaths every year in the U.S.A. from garden variety flu, on checking where this figure came from, it seems to have been plucked out of the air. I cannot find anywhere that a proper survey has been done and where 36,000 influenza deaths have been counted.
Who came up with the 36,000 deaths per year from plain flu? Is it an invention so we won't be concerned about a few H1N1 deaths this year?
Australian health authorities are completely ignoring World Health Organization advice on Swine Flu. For example, these are the guidelines for staff in flu clinics. If anyone has feedback on other hospital flu clinics I'd be very interested to hear from them.
http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/story/swine-flu-9-deaths-date-australia-45-000-cases
Posted July 1st, 2009 by Mick
Today a three year old boy has died of H1N1 (known as Swine Flu). This brings the total number of deaths in Australia to nine. I wonder whether, had the Australian government taken better precautions, these nine people may not have died. It could be that the ordinary influenza would have killed them as all of them had health problems.
What concerns me is that health authorities are no longer counting flu victims and are no longer testing for Swine Flu. This leaves us all in the dark as to where Swine Flu is striking, how many people are sick, how many are in intensive care, what percentage are contracting pneumonia (which, if viral, could well be fatal even to a healthy person).
People have said to me, "The swine flu epidemic is dying down", but as there have been 9 deaths, it certainly isn't. We are just being fooled into believing it is no longer a problem.
In the beginning, if there was a swine flu case in a school, that school was closed for a few days. This may well have saved lives. No-one can be sure of the state of immunity of any given person at any given time. There was talk of public events such as football matches and concerts being cancelled.
Cruise ships were quarantined. I think the government must have decided that the cost to the economy was so great it wasn't worth the trouble. I think our government may be exposing many vulnerable people to a deadly disease which could kill them.
You might not think so until your grandmother or other relative dies of H1N1. It seems to me it is a more virulent and more highly infectious disease than the 'normal' type of flu. As well, few people have resistance to it: only those who were exposed to outbreaks in the 1930s and 1950s. It also seems, from all reports, to attack the person within 1 or 2 days of contact with an infected person.
This is what happened to my friend's son.
He knows who he was exposed to and he knows when. Within two days he felt like he was dying, with some kind of weird sensation of alteration of consciousness as well as the normal flu-like symptoms of pains in the joints and chills.
This friend I was talking about above, took his teenage son to a 'Flu Clinic' at a public hospital 'somewhere in NSW' yesterday. The triage nurse saw the boy right away - which was good, considering the waiting room was full and also contained a man with severe chest pains who believed he was having a heart attack and who was being ignored. Not so good for him.
The nurse confirmed he had some kind of flu and gave him a mask to wear. The boy's father asked if he would be tested for Swine Flu. The nurse's response was "No, we only test people who have actually died from flu now. The government can't afford to test everyone." When asked about Tamiflu, given the boy has asthma, the answer was no, it's too expensive to hand out willy nilly.
The boy and his father were then asked to sit in the waiting room for 2 hours and wait for a doctor. They declined.
I hope some people reading this will learn from this experience: even though public hospitals have been advertising their swine flu clinics, if you go there, you won't be tested, and you probably won't get Tamiflu, though you might get a prescription for antibiotics if you wait a few hours and if the doctor suspects your chest infection is bacterial.
What happened to the idea of people quarantining themselves at least voluntarily when they have swine flu? Of course now, they are never going to be able to find out if it's Influenza A, H1N1 or maybe just a bad cold.
On my calculations, if 9 people have died, then if .05% of H1N1 victims are dying, 18,000 Australians have had Swine Flu this week. If it is .02%, then 45,000 Australians have had Swine Flu during the past seven days.
The percentages seem to vary depending on where you look. As for the claimed 36,000 deaths every year in the U.S.A. from garden variety flu, on checking where this figure came from, it seems to have been plucked out of the air. I cannot find anywhere that a proper survey has been done and where 36,000 influenza deaths have been counted.
Who came up with the 36,000 deaths per year from plain flu? Is it an invention so we won't be concerned about a few H1N1 deaths this year?
Australian health authorities are completely ignoring World Health Organization advice on Swine Flu. For example, these are the guidelines for staff in flu clinics. If anyone has feedback on other hospital flu clinics I'd be very interested to hear from them.
http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/story/swine-flu-9-deaths-date-australia-45-000-cases