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65 Australians Dead from Swine Flu

Mick | 03.08.2009 11:56 | Analysis | Health

Australian mainstream media seem to be covering up the deaths of 65 Australians from Swine Flu.

There have been no reports of Swine Flu deaths in major Australian newspapers since the toll reached 30. However reports can be found of 65 deaths as of 3rd August. These reports are generally hidden within an article and are never headlined.

If the death rate is .45% (and we can't be sure of the accuracy of that), 14,000 Australians have so far had Swine Flu.

This is very alarming for other countries. Australia is currently in mid winter. The population of Australia is only 21 million. The population of the U.K. is 61 million. It could be that the strain of Swine Flu infecting Australians is worse than that in the U.K.

According to the New Scientist, estimates of death rates are flawed.

 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17466-swine-flu-death-rate-estimates-flawed.html

Australian and U.K. authorities have evidently been warned by their health departments to add a disclaimer statement to all announcements of Swine Flu deaths: "The dead person had underlying serious health problems."

Because of the way in which this statement is being emphasised in both countries, I can't help feeling a bit paranoid about the delivery of Swine Flu news.

When these 'underlying health problems' are leaked to the media, it turns out they were nothing more serious than being a tad overweight, being pregnant or having mild asthma. I don't consider those 'serious underlying health problems'. I don't know about you, but when I think of serious conditions that might cause a person to succumb to the flu, I think of HIV, leukemia or cancer.

The other interesting fact about the reporting of Swine Flu deaths in both the U.K. and Australia is that the doctor or other official announcing the death always states that the family don't want further details released due to privacy concerns.

You would think that by now, some of the families of Swine Flu victims would have been picked up by current affairs programmes or magazines such as That's Life and interviewed about the tragic loss of their family member in this pandemic.

No such stories are appearing in the Australian media. How about the U.K.? Are families of victims speaking up, coming forward, telling the details of their deceased relatives' alleged 'serious underlying health problems'?

Strangely, I can't find any such articles or interviews. I can't even find anything on blogs.

The other statement I find puzzling is that 'Swine Flu causes only mild symptoms in most people." Not in the people I know who have had it. They all ended up with pneumonia and felt they were going to die. They had never been so sick in their lives. They were ill for two weeks and some lost 5kgs in weight due to vomiting and being unable to stomach any food. Another symptom has been a fear of bright lights. One person I know was being driven to hospital and demanded to be taken back home, being unable to stand daylight. This person was crying and covering his eyes with his hands.

Where is the truth? Is it being withheld from us, perhaps to avoid public panic?

In Australia, doctors are no longer testing for Swine Flu, but a number of doctors have stated that all cases of flu are now Swine Flu as it has become the dominant strain.

Schools are not being closed when there are cases of flu. It is being allowed to run its course, even though the vaccine is not ready.

The government will be fully responsible for all 65 deaths and the ones yet to come because of their lax attitude to containing infection. You would think they would care about those with 'underlying serious health conditions' sufficiently to attempt to prevent them being infected by taking some basic pandemic precautions, but there are no such precautions.

Unlike in the U.K., people are encouraged to flock to doctors' surgeries and hospital waiting rooms with Swine Flu where they infect countless others. There are no Swine Flu clinics where those who are infected can at least be separated from other sick people. Some doctors' surgeries are offering free masks to people who have a cough, but such masks are known to be ineffective, and not all Swine Flu patients are coughing.

At least we have been warned that the condition of sufferers can deteriorate very suddenly when the inevitable pneumonia strikes, with death within 24 hours or so, if treatment is not sought.

It is admitted we do not have enough intensive care beds to cope with Swine Flu as well as all the accidents and other illnesses that occur. So some victims will receive intensive care, while other 'less worthy' people will be given palliative care and allowed to die.

It is as if a person with 'serious underlying health conditions' is somehow less of a loss to society, as if they somehow brought their death upon themselves by being unhealthy. It seems that the death of an allegedly unhealthy person is of less importance than the death of someone who was 'otherwise healthy'.

So far, not one 'otherwise healthy' person has been found to have died of Swine Flu in Australia. But I do not believe this. I hope that the families of victims will soon come forward and become whistleblowers.

Australia has had 2 deaths per day since the beginning of the real pandemic. This is very worrying when the 'second wave', which will be more deadly, hasn't even arrived.

Will the vaccines work? Will some die from side effects of the vaccines? Is Tamiflu really any use against this flu?

Time will tell. No-one really knows what will happen next, but one thing is for sure, if the government can possibly avoid telling us what is really going on, they will do so. The silencing of flu victims' families attests to that.

Mick

Comments

Hide the following 11 comments

65? please get some fucking perspective

03.08.2009 12:06

you nutjobs have any idea how many people a year die from 'normal' flu??

IMCista


Completely agree with IMCista

03.08.2009 12:58


It's to the credit of Australia's media if they're not over-hyping Swine flu. The people I know have had in London say it felt a bit worse than normal flu, but they're all back at work now. Thousands die each year of standard types of flu because they have underlying health problems.




Orville N


Hmmm

03.08.2009 15:24

Today thousands of children died from lack of access to clean drinking water, thousands died from AIDS, thousands died from malnutrition, and hundreds died of malaria.

Lets keep things in perspective here.

Cynic


douche-bag IMCista

03.08.2009 16:28

What a douche-bag IMCista to call a contributor a nut-job. It's self-important abusive wankers like you that ruin this site. If you had read Micks post and weren't such a pseudo intellectual then you would've been able to discern some valid points, but even if you'd chosen to argue against it then you could have done so reasonably rather than condeming the posters mental health. Moronic scum like you have no place in IM or any other collective. By cowardly putting 'IMCista' instead of your own name to your pathetic post you cowardly hide your own sick stupidity behind IM-UKs aprons, thus accentuating your douche-baggery ten-fold

When people complain of the millions who have died in the US/UK invasion of Iraq, do you say "please get some fucking perspective" since after all, far more died in other wars. No, so why act like a douche-bag about this poster? Do you have any mental-health qualifications necessary to impugn his mental health or you just the unqualified know-it-all you seem to be?

The numbers of people who have died isn't being hyped, the risk comes from the disease mutating into something far dealier. And the numbers who die from regular flu are irrelevant since this was an avoidable pandemic caused by factory farming, an event that is likely to be repeated until direct action is taken to stop it.

For the record, Australian deaths stand at 67 out of 22109 infected. The death rate should be higher in winter but that is still an abnormally high level of infections which does suggest government mishandling and poor medical advice as Mick claimed.

Danny


danny...danny...danny

03.08.2009 17:26

calm down, it's a post on IM, you remember freedom of expression, or is that purely based on whats being said?

Much qudos (sp) for getting in an Iraq dig in a post about swine flu, top effort, but a loss of points for not getting in Gordon Brown or Tony Blair.

Just one thing, can you post the link to the report about the origins of Swine flu being caused by a particular farming practice, I had it stuck in my mind that the WHO have yet to find patient zero and do the trace.

I think the whole thing is silly, "pandemic!!!" a woman at work had it and it amounted to a nasty cold. GSK want it to be blow up so they can get profits, and reactionaries want it to feed off it for pointless political gain.

The NHS is doing a fine job of treating people for this afliction, I propose a round of applause for thier hard work.

anon through right


Factory Farm Flu

03.08.2009 18:29

>Just one thing, can you post the link to the report about the origins of Swine flu being caused by a particular farming practice, I had it stuck in my mind that the WHO have yet to find patient zero and do the trace.

Actually they keep finding new 'patient zero's, as you'd expect since the genes of the flu tell us it started last November after all. The WHO won't mention factory farming but these two things are fact - this diseases orginated in pigs [1], and this disease first expressed itself in humans living next to a factory farm of pigs kept alive by solely by overdosing on anti-biotics (hardly what I'd call a 'particular farming practice') [2]. Go figure the maths, biology and the chemistry or trust in Occams Razor and recognise that this is not a natural disease. It wasn't deliberately engineered, but neither was it surprising given how we treat pigs.

All factory farms are also diseases factories, but pig farms are the most dangerous because different varieties of flu readily combine within pigs. This disease started in pigs, was spread to humans and back to pigs elsewhere. The major and very real danger is that it recombines / mutates again in another sick factory pig and then really decimates humanity. The simple way to stop this from happening is to close every pig factory farm. Organic pigs are hugely less risky so if you can't live without bacon then at least pay for humane organic pork which carries significantly less health risks.


[1]  http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17077-flu-outbreak-the-pig-connection.html

[2]  http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters

Danny


Thanks Danny

03.08.2009 23:19

Thanks for your comments Danny. I certainly hope I'm not a nut job.
In 2007 the media got quite excited about the deaths of 6 children from seasonal flu:
 http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/08/14/2004956.htm
They haven't headlined the 65 deaths of young people this winter. I think they've been instructed not to by the government.
Flu generally kills elderly people in nursing homes and people with immune system problems such as cancer patients.
Swine flu has not really 'arrived' as yet. As in 1919, it will be the second wave that kills large numbers.
What I'm concerned about is the continual assertions by government-employed doctors that these people had 'serious underlying health conditions' because I don't believe they did have. I don't agree that pregnancy, for example, is a 'serious underlying health condition', or being an unborn baby. For the government to classify a pregnant woman and child as in bad health is very strange - I think they're grasping at straws to convince the public that worthy members of society, the fit and well, don't die from this.
I am concerned about the silencing of victims' families, too. No-one has come forward and said that their relative died of swine flu. The government may have invoked its emergency powers to put a D-notice on publication of matters related to swine flu deaths, unless that information has come from the government itself. Our government is fully responsible for those 65 deaths. We had no Swine Flu in Australia until some people on a cruise ship became infected. At first the ship was quarantined. Then the government decided that it was doing too much damage to the economy and the travel industry so they let the people off the ship. They wandered around Brisbane and Sydney spreading their germs, they got onto planes, trams and trains and in no time thousands were infected. 65 people died because of this.
There has been no attempt since then by our government to take steps to minimise the spread of Swine Flu. There is total chaos at hospital casualty wards and queues for doctors' surgeries spill onto footpaths. If you don't have Swine Flu and you go into Casualty or the doctor's surgery, you are sure as hell going to have it when you come out.
We have no intensive care beds or respirators or cardiac bypass machines vacant for accident victims. Most complicated surgery has been cancelled for this reason. How many car accident victims will die because a swine flu patient has the respirator? We have hundreds of swine flu victims on last-resort life support machines.
The government is completely unprepared for the 'second wave' in which thousands will need intensive care and cardiac bypass machines. The 'second wave' could arrive during our summer, since this flu has no respect for the seasons.
If they can't cope with 14,000 infections and 65 deaths, how are they going to cope with the 'real thing'?
They are counting on the vaccine working to prevent infection. I don't think we can be sure that it will work, and we have to hope it won't cause people to die of Guillain Barre syndrome which they did a few years back in the U.S.
Swine flu has yet to do its worst. This is only the milder first wave. In 1918 there were many newspaper reports that I have found in the archives describing a flu that was mostly mild. By 1919 it was a different story.
 http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18124365.200-down-with-the-flu.html
In developing countries, there will be no vaccination and no intensive care treatment. We are living in the 'lucky countries'.

Mick
- Homepage: http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/


@Mike

04.08.2009 10:04

Mike,
I was interested in your post because I didn't realise how bad the disease was there already.
Australia is up to 70 deaths now:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_in_Australia

The UK is meant to be badly hit, but we've only had 31 deaths here, so Australia is about 7 times worse hit than the UK given it's smaller population. Mishandling by the Australian authorities must be a contributary factor in that, but so will be the Winter there as sunshine helps kill the virus quicker. Once an epidemic reaches a 'critical mass' then there is no way to contain it, but containment can slow it to give authorities more time to prepare. Schools should be closed, extra wards should be opened, that sort of thing.

Up to 3000 Australians die of seasonal influenza in Australia, which is unavoidable, but it is wrong to compare that with this swine flu. For a start, Swine flu was perfectly avoidable by closing down pig factory farms. Secondly, it is a steady regular figure whereas this pandemic could increase geometrically quickly. The 1918 Swine flu pandemic infected a third of the worlds population and killed up to a sixteenth of the population -100 million then which would be 375 million today. That would swamps the 2008 global death total from infectious disease which stands at about 17 million deaths.
 http://www.globalhealth.org/infectious_diseases/

The current swine flu is most likely to recombine to a more deadly form in pigs, and most likely to recombine in a factory farmed pig doused in daily anti-biotics. Shutting these disease factories down just now has no health costs and could stop the deadliest possible phase of the disease. Keeping them shut would drastically reduce the chances of a similar pandemic happening again in the next few years. Yet this most basic of precautionary methods isn't even being discussed, because the pig business is big business. The WHO were even forced to point out repeatedly that you cannot directly catch this from pig meat, which is an utter prostitution of the organisation since this disease wouldn't have evolved if people didn't buy cheap pig meat.

Like I said, this is a crossover issue that covers animal-rights, anti-capitalists, anti-copyright, vegans and vegetarians and basically anyone who isn't prepared to die for a daily bacon roll. Sure, most people who have had it will have survived, but that is no reason to dismiss interest in the pandemic as panic-mongering. I've met apolitical apathetic people who have been so scared by this that they wish to take direct action for the first time, and that should be encouraged not dismissed. We are in an evoltionary battle with influenza and factory farms are it's best breeding ground, incubating and accelerating it's development significantly.

Danny


?

05.08.2009 17:39

As the disease has "gone human" surely shutting down the farms is fairly accedemic, they arnt producing the virus, we are, the genie is out of the lamp.

I smell a bandwagon.

lets compare,

Swine flu, a bad cold that has been known to kill people, but far less than it's brother, normal flu.
Those it kills have invariably a indemic problem and it overwhelms the persons imune system, the relief of these symptoms (Tamiflu) makes you feel awfull and does in fact make you feel far worse than the disease.

AIDS is a horrific disease,I personally don't know where it came from but the disease is at it's highest in Africa, spread by human contact, you don't get over it. No cure, you die a slow death.

Please apply your logic to the problem, close Africa?



mouse


Factory farms are flu resevoirs

06.08.2009 23:02

>As the disease has "gone human" surely shutting down the farms is fairly accedemic, they arnt producing the virus, we are, the genie is out of the lamp.

No, it is about it stopping it returning to the lamp to use it as an incubator for something worse. It is about stopping the increasingly prevalent pandemic threats at source.

Danny


85 Australians now dead

09.08.2009 23:44

85 have died as of today.

Mick


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