This just in . . .

It's easy to lose track of current events during the holidays, so here's an update of the week's most important news. We lead off with a breaking swine flu story:

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I don't know what happened in the Ukraine regarding swine flu (or some other illness) and without any hard facts we refrained from speculating on it (we did post once on the lack of clarity and WHO's reponse). We still don't know what to say about what did or didn't happen, although it appears…
The novel swine flu has affected its one millionth American. The first death in England has been recorded (a 9 year old girl). Yesterday, the first Brazilian death was recorded. When we look at the map of the disease, note that many regions of Africa are totally devoid of cases. Just so you…
The Wall Street Journal has just reported that over 1,000 people in the Americas, according to data released by the World Health Organization, have died from the Swine Flu. They seem to think you should be alarmed. The global A/H1N1 swine flu pandemic has claimed 1,154 lives since the outbreak was…
Okay, one more quick post. I've talked quite a bit on here (and over on Panda's Thumb) about the importance of surveillance, and how the current death rates from H5N1 influenza ("bird flu") are likely to be artificially high, since we're more likely to diagnose the very ill cases than the mild or…