Europeans urged to avoid Mexico and US as swine flu death toll rises

[FarCenter]

The EU's health commissioner today urged Europeans to postpone non-essential travel to Mexico and the US, as the death toll from the virus in Mexico rose to at least 149 and the first cases were confirmed in the UK.

In Luxembourg, where EU foreign ministers were discussing the virus, Androulla Vassiliou told reporters people should avoid travelling to Mexico or the US "unless it is very urgent for them".

The World Health Organisation has brought forward to this afternoon a meeting of its international flu experts to advise it on whether the current pandemic alert level should be raised, because of the increasing number of confirmed swine flu casesaround the world.

The group met on Saturday and had planned to reconvene tomorrow, while EU health ministers will hold an emergency meeting on Thursday.

"Personally, I'd try to avoid non-essential travel to the areas which are reported to be in the centre of the cluster in order to minimise the personal risk and to reduce the potential risk to spread the infection to other people," Vassiliou said.

<snip> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/27/swine-flu-mexico

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Much more detail at the link.

Following are my hypothetical calculations regarding possible severity ---

Normally, the winter flu affects about 10% of the population and kills about 20,000 in the US.

A new strain of flu is likely to affect about 30% of the population. If the mortality is similar to the existing circulating strains, then there would be about 60,000 deaths in the US. Multiply by 20 for the world population, and you get about 1.2 million deaths.

However, this strain responds to Tamiflu and other antiviral drugs, so in the developed world the death toll might be a lot less. Nevertheless, for the 3 billion in the rest of the world, there would still be 600,000 deaths. This would not be statistically significant if they occur over a few months, since the daily death rate from all causes is about 200,000 worldwide.

The probable course of action is to try to slow it down in order to ensure that antiviral stockpiles can be replenished fast enough, but otherwise it can be expected to run its course.

The death toll doesn't seem to be high enough to warrant shutting down commerce significantly.