In announcing this week that swine flu had been implicated in the deaths of two more New Yorkers, the city?s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, added a by-now familiar caveat: Both of them, he said, had ?underlying conditions.? ...
Dr. Frieden intended his warning, which he has applied to all four New York deaths so far linked to the H1N1 virus, to be at once helpful to those who might be more at risk for the disease and reassuring to those who are not.
But it may apply to so many households that efforts to control public fears by using the term may be having something of an adverse effect. Even accounting for people who have more than one condition, statistics suggest that the city?s long list of red flags may encompass as many as one in three people.
?Many, many people share the same underlying causes that my husband had, and if he?s at risk, many people are at risk,? said Bonnie Wiener, the widow of Mitchell Wiener, 55, the first New Yorker to die of swine flu, on May 17.
She disputed the city?s assertion that underlying conditions were a factor in his death. ?He was overweight and he was taking medicine for high blood pressure,? she said. ?How many people 50 and above don?t??
About 50 percent of swine flu hospitalizations globally and about 70 percent of those in the United States seem to involve underlying conditions.
