Minstry of Health Lying to Health Minister, Tony Ryall about flu deaths.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10582615 (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10582615)

Health Minister Tony Ryall expressed condolences for the families of the three victims.

He said health authorities were working hard to manage the spread in communities. "Every year New Zealand loses about 400 people to seasonal flu and swine flu is going to lead to more deaths on top of that - how many we don't know.

Okay, here is the URL for the attached pdf.

http://www.esr.cri.nz/SiteCollectionDocuments/ESR/Corporate/PDF/briefingDecember07a.pdf

But I've attached it, just in case some porkie removes it.

However, look at the table on page three. I've attached the a jpg of this below.

remember that New Zealand has a population of four million.

Now, tell me where the New Zealand Health Department gets off telling Tony Ryall that 400 people die each year.

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f71/Angladrion/InflMortandvaxrates2007.jpg

But hey, this is nothing unusual. This is MOH modus operandi, business as usual.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

Note that as of 2006, influenza vaccine uptake had reached the MARVELLLOUSSSS rate, nationwide, of.... 185 DOSES per 1,000 people in the country.

Woopee.

[magical1]

I'm confused how they come to get statistics on Flu deaths at all. It seems that the flu is the straw that breaks the camels back rather than the true cause of death... Say I had cancer and am really ill for ages, then I get the flu and die... did I die of flu or cancer?

OR... I get the flu and then die of flu complications like pneumonia... Did I die of flu or pneumonia?

What did any of these people actually die from? How can they say that the numbers are down because of immunisation uptake... it would be so easy to write off flu deaths as something else... perhaps.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

Well, see my dear, I'm just doing my duty, and providing you the data like this page here:

http://www.surv.esr.cri.nz/PDF_surveillance/Virology/FluAnnRpt/InfluenzaAnn2006.pdf
See attached pdf.

I mean, lets be honest.

If ESR is going to say something in 2006, that the highest number of deaths was 94, ten years before, where do they get off telling Ryall that there are 400 deaths?

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f71/Angladrion/InfluenzaAnn2006.jpg

After all, ESR is supposedly the ultimate in accuracy when it comes to cat's whiskers.

My answer to that Magical, is that they make up the data to suit.

What other explanation is there?

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

Ah yes, here's the answer to your question, from the Public Health commissions advice to the Minister of Health in 1995. This is their formula for how to take known deaths, look in the crystal ball, and inflate the data massively:

From Page 14 - see pdf attached.

I uploaded page 14 onto photobucket. it's loaded twice, just fine, but won't show up.

You'll have to read page 14 in the document attached.

It says:


The years during which there is an epidemic of influenza can account for
over 1000 deaths. For the 13 year period (1980–1992), there were 769 deaths
diagnosed as due to influenza and 5650 excess deaths attributed to influenza.
This suggests that for every death that is recorded as due to influenza there
are 7.7 deaths which are also due to influenza but are not recognised as such.
Hence, the overall impact of influenza on mortality is estimated to be 8.7
times greater than the number of recorded influenza deaths. This is higher
than the factor of 3.7 for the Netherlands (Sprenger et al, 1993), but similar
to the factor of 10 for England and Wales (Ashley et al, 1991).

[magical1]

My thoughts exactly. You should Email Tony Ryall with that graph. If you don't want to I will.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

so you make the word "suggests" into fact, huh?

And in 2009, parrot that 1995 "suggestion" as being reality.

Great way to soup up some drama.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

Here's the Eurosurveillance "method" of evaluating death rates. Again, it's crystal ball gazing.

http://www.eurosurveillance.org/ViewArticle.aspx?ArticleId=19255

Read the whole thing. As you see here, they multiply, though not as grossly as New Zealand does:


This method used confirmed deaths and cases reported to the World Health Organization (WHO), but with a range of multipliers for the latter to adjust for under-ascertainment. These multipliers were based on expert judgement that most symptomatic cases of the new pandemic involve relatively mild symptoms and that the great majority of cases were not being identified and reported. For example, spokespeople from the United States (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have announced “hundreds of thousands of cases that have occurred in the US” in late May and mid-June 2009 [2,3]. Similarly, one estimate for the United Kingdom was 30,000 cases in the community in May 2009 [4]. Regarding the choice of a multiplier to adjust data on laboratory-confirmed cases of pandemic influenza, we considered the above assessments, which are specific to the current pandemic, to be more informative than past experience with seasonal influenza, which only provides very broad estimates of a potential multiplier.

[Damien]

They do the exact same sort of creative accounting in the USA:
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.htm

The real numbers are <em>much</em> lower:
2006: 860 (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_16.pdf)
2005: 1,812
2001: 267
2000: 1,765
1999: 1,665

The numbers are difficult to find and they don't separate out the different strains of the virus.