Quote:
Originally Posted by Phaneuf3
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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While they have made great strides in medicine. Our tools against battling viral infections is still woefully primitive. It basically involves vaccination, quarantine and bed rest. With travel much easier than in 1918 a full blown pandemic could wipe out a much greater chunk of the population.