Bird Flu Hype

Bird Flu Hype Newsletter

Commentary by: Dr. Sherri J. Tenpenny

May 20, 2005: THIS WEEK IN THE NEWS:

May 20 (Bloomberg) -- Bird flu has killed 64 percent of those people known to be infected with the virus this year, according to World Health Organization statistics, with the number of fatalities since Jan. 1 surpassing 2005 levels.

DON'T BELIEVE IT!!

Here's the truth from FOWL! Bird Flu: It's Not What You Think (pg. 45)

The actual death rate from bird flu, reported by the media is completely unknown. Only the deaths of very ill persons who died in hospitals and had a positive test for H5N1 have been reported. Given how many people in Southeast Asia and across the globe who live with and handle poultry, there is a high probability that large numbers of them have had uneventful contact with the H5N1 virus. Farmers in Southeast Asia literally sleep with their birds and there has been no transmission from birds to humans.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals with H5N1 influenza have not been sick enough to require medical care, as confirmed by Dick Thompson, spokesperson for the WHO. In an interview with CIDRAP News in March 2005, Thompson stated, "The obvious assumption is that others are infected, and either not getting sick, or are not getting sick enough to seek treatment at a hospital. Factoring those patients [makes the death rate] impossible to determine, because the denominator is unknown."

Dr. John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University, concurred with Thompson's observation. Based only on cases of severely ill persons, Paulos asserts that the reported death rate is an "almost textbook case" of sample bias. He explained that asymptomatic people, and those who have recovered uneventfully, aren't part of the mortality rate calculations. As a consequence, the numbers are skewed substantially upward.