Not really that useful, but anyway

[magnetik]

I was checking out the official confirmed H1N1 cases report from WHO website as of yesterday (8th June).

I was still expecting the most cases to be in Mexico, having 5717 confirmed, but the US has 13217. I looked at the official deaths as well. Mexico has 106 and US has 27.

So I tried to work out the % deaths from total cases.
That gives Mexico as %

Comments

[metao]

Yeah. Its the flu.

I DON'T CARE WHO HAS THE FLU.

SARS was slightly more interesting - a full 98% of people who got that survived with no lasting consequences of any kind.

[ohayo_sakura]

Cool, thanks for posting this info!

I read somewhere that the death rate has a correlation with the living conditions in the country.

Like, in Australia, America, Canada, the UK and Japan, if you have the flu (any flu, not just swine flu) so badly that you're feverish and need to go see a doctor/go to hospital for treatment, you can.

But in countries like Mexico where medical facilities are not always available and living conditions for the poorer classes can be quite terrible, it would be very possible to die from the very same strain of flu that would not be fatal in a developed country given adequate medical treatment. So, I wonder about living conditions in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica (for the poorer classes).

[ext_3201]

I would expect that to be a reasonable statement for any disease.

[digitalduck]

I read a very interesting report a week ago about the death rate of H1N1, and the human response to infection by the virus. There was a high corelation between environmental arsenic levels and the death rate.

The reasoning was that arsenic temporarily inhibits or delays the body's immune response for a few days, after which time it kicks into action but in a kind of overreaction. The deaths were caused by the body's own excessive immune response to the infection, not the viral infection itself.

Large parts of Mexico have high levels of arsenic in their water supplies. Most of the western world doesn't.

I think this report was in New Scientist or a similar publication.

[retrogradeorbit]

How do they confirm that these cases are H1N1 without genomic sequencing of the pathogens?

One story floating around here is that the virus has devolved into a less deadly strain, which may explain the lower than expected death rate. Either that or the paranoia, combined with lack of sequencing machines, is causing pathology to be overly cautious with respect to border line cases, and so we are getting a large number of false positives in the data sets.