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Old 08-25-2009, 11:29 AM   #984
Phaneuf3
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Join Date: Oct 2005
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Quote:
Originally Posted by transplant99 View Post
Not taking a shot per se Mikey....but again you believe a strain of the flu that has already claimed more people worldwide the last century than the population of Canada....is bogus hype???
Well, to be fair the hype was disproportionately high.

Cancer for example killed 7.9 million people worldwide in 2007. Multiply that by 100 years to get a century long figure (yes, yes oversimplified I know but its close enough so lets run with it) and you're at 790 million or about 24 times the population of Canada

I could only find the US stats so we'll extrapolate those to worldwide figured but... Car accidents kill about 42,000 every year in the states. If you extrapolate at that rate to the population of the world that's about 860,000 per year. Multiply that by a hundred years and you have 86,000,000 or about two and a half times the population of Canada.



Sure, those figures aren't the actual ones and are just extrapolations of current rates and furthermore its a bit suspect to take the US car accident fatality rate and simply multiply it based on world population for obvious reasons. But... they're just as valid as comparing medicine from the 1900's to today.

H1N1 is bad and all but the hype did get a bit overblown.
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