“The rising numbers of swine flu cases mean trying to contain the virus is no longer an option, the government says. Andy Burnham, the health secretary in England, said: ‘The national focus will be on treating the increasing numbers affected by swine flu. Cases are doubling every week and on this trend we could see over 100,000 cases per day by the end of August’”.

In my day job recently I’ve been doing a bit of project planning, using existing numbers to predict future numbers. Let’s play with these swine flu numbers a little, shall we?

On June 10 the number of reported swine flu cases was 800.

Meaning that at the reported exponential infection rate, by June 17 there were 1,600 cases, June 24 3,200, July 1 6,400, by July 8 there will be 12,800, July 15 25,600, July 22 51,200, August 1 102,400, August 8 204,800, August 15 409,600, August 22 819,200, and ‘the end of August’ gives us 1,638,400 cases. We’re of course not counting the people who no longer have the illness by the end of August, because news reporting hasn’t been telling us how well and quickly people have been recovering, just how they’ve been succumming.

So, lets say now that by the end of August, we tail off the exponential infection rate and just keep with the linear infection rate of 100,000 per day. That’s a million people every ten days, or three million people per month.

October will in that case give us 4.5 million cases, November, 7.5 million cases, December, 10.5 million cases, January, 13.5 million cases. Or a full fifth of the whole UK population.

Scaremongering?

“In preparation for a potential heatwave this summer, people need to make sure they have a fair weather friend they can call on for aid, officials advise”.

The Met Office are apparently not quite sure yet whether we’re actually going to get a serious disaster-level heatwave like we had in (was it 2006?), but they do think we’re definitely going to get a hot summer.

If we do have a full scale heatwave, fortunately the Department of Health has published a Heatwave Plan containing lots of top advice about how beat the blazing sun:

New cases of the deadly swine flu virus have been confirmed as far afield as New Zealand and Israel, as the UN warns it cannot be contained.

The US, Canada, Spain and Britain confirmed cases earlier but no deaths have been reported outside Mexico, where the virus was first reported.

From the way the news media – including online / social media sources – are reporting this developing story, anybody would think the world is on the brink of Terry Nation’s Survivors becoming a reality; the BBC Radio 4 Today programme headline for the item declares “Up to 40% of population could become ill“, with one commentator in the item reminding us that the country could literally grind to a standstill as not only the people being ill being off work, but also the people staying at home to look after them; and emergency planning teams of local councils issuing statements about how resiliant they are.

As of writing, in Mexico – where the outbreak started – the current total number of confirmed cases is 20, with 152 described as ‘probable’, and a further 1,614 people ‘under observation’.

In the rest of the world, where there are as yet no confirmed deaths:

Putting those numbers in perspective, the populations of those countries are:

Putting the numbers further in perspective, flu epidemics occur every year all over the world, and the human tragedy is that hundreds of thousands of people die of it every year with tens of millions of people – globally – dying in roughly three pandemics per century as a new strain emerges.

Tens of millions of deaths is clearly a serious human tragedy, but in the meanwhile, 884,000,000 people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water, with 3,900 children per day – 1,423,500 per year – dying of diarrhea alone.

Over the last four years we’ve been being told we were all going to die of Bird Flu, and in November 2002 we were told we were all going to die of SARS.

I think clean drinking water is a more pressing concern.

(Source link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8022437.stm)

“Religious groups should fund their own presence in UK hospitals and save the NHS some £40m per year, the National Secular Society (NSS) suggests. The organisation of non-believers says such money would be better spent on ‘much needed’ nurses or cleaners. The NSS said it contacted 233 acute and mental health trusts which spent a total of £26.72m on chaplains, at an average of £48,953 each. The society extrapolated these figures for the whole of the UK to produced a national average of £32m”.

I agree with the spokesperson representing ‘the Churches’ inasmuch as hospital chaplains provide a valuable service – to those who make use of them.

But I fully agree with the position of the National Secular Society when they say it’s far more important for the NHS to be using its funds to pay for doctors, nurses, cleaners, drugs, and equipment.

And it’s not just a matter of cash, but equality. Why should ‘big churches’ get to get their hireling ministers into hospitals at taxpayers’ expense, but not smaller ones?

And where might we draw the line on what constitutes a ‘valid’ chaplain anyway? If the taxpayer pays for a Church of England or Roman Catholic priest, why shouldn’t it also pay for a Mormon pastor? Or a Jehovah’s Witness? Or a Moonie or a Scientologist?

“Wolfing down meals may be enough to nearly double a person’s risk of being overweight, Japanese research suggests. Those, who, in addition to wolfing down their meals, tended to eat until they felt full, were more than three times more likely to be overweight”.

So basically, ‘research shows’ that if you eat quickly, you eat more, and you get fatter.

Well shit no.