Until now, most folks didn’t get tested for bird flu unless they were sick enough to require intensive medical supervision. And indeed, about half of all cases that have been confirmed by the World Health Organization have ended in death. But that doesn’t mean bird flu is necessarily 50% fatal for humans. A study in this week’s Archives of Internal Medicine found preliminary evidence that lots of farmers in a rural province in Vietnam may have had bird flu but never felt sick enough to seek medical care.
The Archives study isn’t conclusive because no blood tests confirming the presence of H5N1 were performed. But the hypothesis that bird flu is more common and less deadly than previously thought is intriguing.
Just don’t get too comfortable with the thought. The 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more than 50 million people around the world, was, from a mathematical point of view, not very fatal since it killed only 2% of the people it infected. That probably wasn’t a very comforting thought, however, to the 98% who survived.
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