Swine Flu Cases Overestimated?
If you've been diagnosed "probable" or "presumed" 2009 H1N1 or "swine flu" in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn't have H1N1 flu.
In fact, you probably didn't have flu at all. That's according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation.
The ramifications of this finding are important. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Britain's National Health Service, once you have H1N1 flu, you're immune from future outbreaks of the same virus. Those who think they've had H1N1 flu -- but haven't -- might mistakenly presume they're immune. As a result, they might skip taking a vaccine that could help them, and expose themselves to others with H1N1 flu under the mistaken belief they won't catch it. Parents might not keep sick children home from school, mistakenly believing they've already had H1N1 flu.
Why the uncertainty about who has and who hasn't had H1N1 flu?
Attkisson Blogs: Freedom of Information Stalled at CDC
CBSNews.com report on H1N1
In late July, the CDC abruptly advised states to stop testing for H1N1 flu, and stopped counting individual cases. The rationale given for the CDC guidance to forego testing and tracking individual cases was: why waste resources testing for H1N1 flu when the government has already confirmed there's an epidemic?
Some public health officials privately disagreed with the decision to stop testing and counting, telling CBS News that continued tracking of this new and possibly changing virus was important because H1N1 has a different epidemiology, affects younger people more than seasonal flu and has been shown to have a higher case fatality rate than other flu virus strains.
CBS News learned that the decision to stop counting H1N1 flu cases was made so hastily that states weren't given the opportunity to provide input. Instead, on July 24, the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists, CSTE, issued the following notice to state public health officials on behalf of the CDC:
"Attached are the Q&As that will be posted on the CDC website tomorrow explaining why CDC is no longer reporting case counts for novel H1N1. CDC would have liked to have run these by you for input but unfortunately there was not enough time before these needed to be posted (emphasis added)."
When CDC did not provide us with the material, we filed a Freedom of Information request with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). More than two months later, the request has not been fulfilled. We also asked CDC for state-by-state test results prior to halting of testing and tracking, but CDC was again, initially, unresponsive.
Watch CBS News Videos Online
Video above: A CBS News producer asks the director of the CDC, Dr. Thomas Frieden, for this information at a press conference on Sept. 19.
While we waited for CDC to provide the data, which it eventually did, we asked all 50 states for their statistics on state lab-confirmed H1N1 prior to the halt of individual testing and counting in July. The results reveal a pattern that surprised a number of health care professionals we consulted. The vast majority of cases were negative for H1N1 as well as seasonal flu, despite the fact that many states were specifically testing patients deemed to be most likely to have H1N1 flu, based on symptoms and risk factors, such as travel to Mexico.
It's unknown what patients who tested negative for flu were actually afflicted with since the illness was not otherwise determined. Health experts say it's assumed the patients had some sort of cold or upper respiratory infection that is just not influenza.
With most cases diagnosed solely on symptoms and risk factors, the H1N1 flu epidemic may seem worse than it is. For example, on Sept. 22, this alarming headline came from Georgetown University in Washington D.C.: "H1N1 Flu Infects Over 250 Georgetown Students."
H1N1 flu can be deadly and an outbreak of 250 students would be an especially troubling cluster. However, the number of sick students came not from lab-confirmed tests but from "estimates" made by counting "students who went to the Student Health Center with flu symptoms, students who called the H1N1 hotline or the Health Center's doctor-on-call, and students who went to the hospital's emergency room."
Without lab testing, it's impossible to know how many of the students actually had H1N1 flu. But the statistical trend indicates it was likely much fewer than 250.
CDC continues to monitor flu in general and H1N1 through "sentinels," which basically act as spot-checks to detect trends around the nation. But at least one state, California, has found value in tracking H1N1 flu in greater detail.
"What we are doing is much more detailed and expensive than what CDC wants," said Dr. Bela Matyas, California's Acting Chief of Emergency Preparedness and Response. "We're gathering data better to answer how severe is the illness. With CDC's fallback position, there are so many uncertainties with who's being counted, it's hard to know how much we're seeing is due to H1N1 flu rather than a mix of influenza diseases generally. We can tell that apart but they can't."
After our conversation with Dr. Matyas, public affairs officials with the California Department of Public Health emphasized to CBS News that they support CDC policy to stop counting individual cases, maintaining that the state has the resources to gather more specific testing data than the CDC.
Because of the uncertainties, the CDC advises even those who were told they had H1N1 to get vaccinated unless they had lab confirmation. "Persons who are uncertain about how they were diagnosed should get the 2009 H1N1 vaccine."
That's unwelcome news for a Marietta, Georgia mom whose two children were diagnosed with "probable" H1N1 flu over the summer. She hoped that would mean they wouldn't need the hastily developed H1N1 flu vaccine. However, since their cases were never confirmed with lab tests, the CDC advises they get the vaccine. "I wish they had tested and that I knew for sure whether they had it. I'm not anxious to give them an experimental vaccine if they don't need it."
Speaking to CBS' "60 Minutes," CDC Director Dr. Frieden said he has confidence that the vaccine will be safe and effective: "We're confident it will be effective we have every reason to believe that it will be safe."
However, the CDC recommendation for those who had "probable" or "presumed" H1N1 flu to go ahead and get vaccinated anyway means the relatively small proportion of those who actually did have H1N1 flu will be getting the vaccine unnecessarily. This exposes them to rare but significant side effects, such as paralysis from Guillain-Barre syndrome.
It also uses up vaccine, which is said to be in short supply. The CDC was hoping to have shipped 40 million doses by the end of October, but only about 30 million doses will be available this month.
The CDC did not response to questions from CBS News for this report.
Washington Unplugged: H1N1 Cases Exaggerated?
H1N1 Misdiagnoses Could Have Consequences
Watch CBS News Videos Online
Copyright 2009 CBS. All rights reserved. In fact, you probably didn't have flu at all. That's according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation.
The ramifications of this finding are important. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Britain's National Health Service, once you have H1N1 flu, you're immune from future outbreaks of the same virus. Those who think they've had H1N1 flu -- but haven't -- might mistakenly presume they're immune. As a result, they might skip taking a vaccine that could help them, and expose themselves to others with H1N1 flu under the mistaken belief they won't catch it. Parents might not keep sick children home from school, mistakenly believing they've already had H1N1 flu.
Why the uncertainty about who has and who hasn't had H1N1 flu?
Attkisson Blogs: Freedom of Information Stalled at CDC
CBSNews.com report on H1N1
In late July, the CDC abruptly advised states to stop testing for H1N1 flu, and stopped counting individual cases. The rationale given for the CDC guidance to forego testing and tracking individual cases was: why waste resources testing for H1N1 flu when the government has already confirmed there's an epidemic?
Some public health officials privately disagreed with the decision to stop testing and counting, telling CBS News that continued tracking of this new and possibly changing virus was important because H1N1 has a different epidemiology, affects younger people more than seasonal flu and has been shown to have a higher case fatality rate than other flu virus strains.
CBS News learned that the decision to stop counting H1N1 flu cases was made so hastily that states weren't given the opportunity to provide input. Instead, on July 24, the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists, CSTE, issued the following notice to state public health officials on behalf of the CDC:
"Attached are the Q&As that will be posted on the CDC website tomorrow explaining why CDC is no longer reporting case counts for novel H1N1. CDC would have liked to have run these by you for input but unfortunately there was not enough time before these needed to be posted (emphasis added)."
When CDC did not provide us with the material, we filed a Freedom of Information request with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). More than two months later, the request has not been fulfilled. We also asked CDC for state-by-state test results prior to halting of testing and tracking, but CDC was again, initially, unresponsive.
Watch CBS News Videos Online
Video above: A CBS News producer asks the director of the CDC, Dr. Thomas Frieden, for this information at a press conference on Sept. 19.
While we waited for CDC to provide the data, which it eventually did, we asked all 50 states for their statistics on state lab-confirmed H1N1 prior to the halt of individual testing and counting in July. The results reveal a pattern that surprised a number of health care professionals we consulted. The vast majority of cases were negative for H1N1 as well as seasonal flu, despite the fact that many states were specifically testing patients deemed to be most likely to have H1N1 flu, based on symptoms and risk factors, such as travel to Mexico.
(CBS/Gordon Donovan)
It's unknown what patients who tested negative for flu were actually afflicted with since the illness was not otherwise determined. Health experts say it's assumed the patients had some sort of cold or upper respiratory infection that is just not influenza.
With most cases diagnosed solely on symptoms and risk factors, the H1N1 flu epidemic may seem worse than it is. For example, on Sept. 22, this alarming headline came from Georgetown University in Washington D.C.: "H1N1 Flu Infects Over 250 Georgetown Students."
H1N1 flu can be deadly and an outbreak of 250 students would be an especially troubling cluster. However, the number of sick students came not from lab-confirmed tests but from "estimates" made by counting "students who went to the Student Health Center with flu symptoms, students who called the H1N1 hotline or the Health Center's doctor-on-call, and students who went to the hospital's emergency room."
Without lab testing, it's impossible to know how many of the students actually had H1N1 flu. But the statistical trend indicates it was likely much fewer than 250.
CDC continues to monitor flu in general and H1N1 through "sentinels," which basically act as spot-checks to detect trends around the nation. But at least one state, California, has found value in tracking H1N1 flu in greater detail.
"What we are doing is much more detailed and expensive than what CDC wants," said Dr. Bela Matyas, California's Acting Chief of Emergency Preparedness and Response. "We're gathering data better to answer how severe is the illness. With CDC's fallback position, there are so many uncertainties with who's being counted, it's hard to know how much we're seeing is due to H1N1 flu rather than a mix of influenza diseases generally. We can tell that apart but they can't."
After our conversation with Dr. Matyas, public affairs officials with the California Department of Public Health emphasized to CBS News that they support CDC policy to stop counting individual cases, maintaining that the state has the resources to gather more specific testing data than the CDC.
Because of the uncertainties, the CDC advises even those who were told they had H1N1 to get vaccinated unless they had lab confirmation. "Persons who are uncertain about how they were diagnosed should get the 2009 H1N1 vaccine."
That's unwelcome news for a Marietta, Georgia mom whose two children were diagnosed with "probable" H1N1 flu over the summer. She hoped that would mean they wouldn't need the hastily developed H1N1 flu vaccine. However, since their cases were never confirmed with lab tests, the CDC advises they get the vaccine. "I wish they had tested and that I knew for sure whether they had it. I'm not anxious to give them an experimental vaccine if they don't need it."
Speaking to CBS' "60 Minutes," CDC Director Dr. Frieden said he has confidence that the vaccine will be safe and effective: "We're confident it will be effective we have every reason to believe that it will be safe."
However, the CDC recommendation for those who had "probable" or "presumed" H1N1 flu to go ahead and get vaccinated anyway means the relatively small proportion of those who actually did have H1N1 flu will be getting the vaccine unnecessarily. This exposes them to rare but significant side effects, such as paralysis from Guillain-Barre syndrome.
It also uses up vaccine, which is said to be in short supply. The CDC was hoping to have shipped 40 million doses by the end of October, but only about 30 million doses will be available this month.
The CDC did not response to questions from CBS News for this report.
Washington Unplugged: H1N1 Cases Exaggerated?
H1N1 Misdiagnoses Could Have Consequences
Watch CBS News Videos Online
God bless you. Heaven has a special place for special ed teachers. Science, however, does not. Special ed has been responsible for many well meant fiascoes because of their lack of scientific training. I need only remind you of "facilitated communication." Your particular scientific method is neither scientific nor methodical. It might produce the nidus of an idea, but it then needs to be fleshed out by methodical research. You are right, you probably don't have the time to do that. But that is no excuse for passing your dabbling in the literature off as serious research.
Again, I have all the respect in the world for special ed teachers and work with them on a daily basis. But scientists they are not.
A 2005 study of brain-blood reduction of ethyl vs. methyl mercury will provide you with a shocking look into the difference between the two. In sum, the study discovered that while ethyl mercury is removed from the blood twice as fast, it stays in the brain 1.7- 3-fold longer than methyl mercury. The implications of this study are that ethyl mercury is far more dangerous to the brain than previous known.
Free link to article below:
http://www.ehponline.org/members/2005/7712/7712.pdf
Please tell us which form of mercury has been proven to cause brain damage in virtually every known case of mercury toxicity just to keep the record straight? I am not talking putative cases. (hint: The largest class action lawsuit involving ethyl mercury and brain damage just got tossed from the courts in Portland this year because there was no demonstrable scientific link between ethyl mercury and neurological or developmental abnormalities.)
The simple fact is that there has never been a double blind research study performed on a flu vaccine. This is usually considered the "gold standard" for the mainstream medical community, so why not with this? You could speculate that you wouldn't want to put people at risk by sham vaccinating them, but what about the risk of injecting them with potentially harmful chemicals that have no legitmate proof of being beneficial? When the usual bias of cohort data is accounted for it is revealed that the regular seasonal flu vaccine has no benefit in reducing hospitalizations, or deaths during the flu season. Did you know that the population of people, especially elderly, that are vaccinated each year have a lower mortality rate during the non-flu season from all other causes of death. AMAZING new discovery; the seasonal flu vaccine protects you from all causes of death according to the cohort study data I looked at!
Anyway, if there is a chance oserious side-effects (which no real scientist disputes) why give something to people that has no benefit? $? $?
-A recent study published in the October 2008 issue of the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine found that vaccinating young children against the flu had no impact on flu-related hospitalizations or doctor visits during two recent flu seasons. The researchers concluded that ?significant influenza vaccine effectiveness could not be demonstrated for any season, age, or setting? examined.
-A study published in the Lancet just two months ago found that influenza vaccination was NOT associated with a reduced risk of pneumonia in older people. Vaccination coverage among the elderly increased from 15 percent in 1980 to 65 percent now, yet there has been no decrease in deaths from influenza or pneumonia.
-That Lancet study supports a similar study done five years ago, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, which concluded that vaccination against pneumonia does not reduce your risk of contracting the disease.
-Research published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine last month also confirms that there has been no decrease in deaths from influenza and pneumonia, despite the fact that vaccination coverage among the elderly has increased from 15 percent in 1980 to 65 percent now.
-Last year, researchers with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the National Institutes of Health published this conclusion in the Lancet Infectious Diseases: ?We conclude that frailty selection bias and use of non-specific endpoints such as all-cause mortality have led cohort studies to greatly exaggerate vaccine benefits.?
-A large-scale, systematic review of 51 studies, published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews in 2006, found no evidence that the flu vaccine is any more effective than a placebo in children. The studies involved 260,000 children, age 6 to 23 months.
http://doctorellisor.com/general/the-flu
For more come and visit us at http://doctorellisor.com
Thanks for reading!
Anyways, there is ample scientific data from studies done with placebo injections confirming that the influenza vaccine is effective in healthy young adults. Double blind studies are lacking and not likely to be forthcoming given all the evidence from less than perfect studies that the vaccine is effective. There is also a legitimate issue as to whether frail, elderly people can respond adequately to seasonal flu vaccines. This does not mean that healthy young people who are at risk for complications in a pandemic can't respond adequately to vaccines.
The issues that are open for further study concern whether the frail elderly can be protected by vaccinating all their contacts (herd immunity) and how best to protect vulnerable children (especially those with chronic lung and heart problems.)
As for the rest of your philosophy, I would love to have you talk to some of the parents of children I have cared for who have either died or been left permanently disabled by vaccine preventable diseases. The last one was convinced by a doctor of chiropractic that they didn't need to immunize their third child against Hemophilus influenza meningitis. The child is now permanently deaf and the parents have started a campaign to inform other parents of the benefits of immunization and the risks of listening to "doctors" without a background in infectious diseases.
For every study you inaccurately cite, there are a 100 more which conclude that immunization against influenza and other disease are probably the greatest medical discovery in the history of man.
http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/updates/international/map.htm
And again, why won't CBS news release the data they received from
the states?
Could it be because a competent examination of the data agrees
with what the CDC has released?
500 Americans received Guillain-Barre syndrome thanks to the Vaccine of the 70s. Chris Dodd, Barney Frank,Harry Reid, Barack Hussein Obama, Junior, CDC, HHS are all a fraud. "Fall of the Republic" would be a good DVD for you for Christmas. Can I send it to CBS to hold for you?