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Return of the Swine Flu: Part 1
Ryan Cole, The Investment U Research Team
- Why the Swine Flu Isn’t Less Scary
In Bangkok, 435 schools and 200 nurseries are closing. They’ll be shut down for the next week, by orders of the Bangkok Municipal Authority.
What prompted this? Simple – H1N1, the swine flu.
Here in the western world – and, more importantly, the northern hemisphere – the swine flu is considered passé. It came around, everyone got frightened, it left, hardly anyone got really sick or died, another big nothing.
Wrong. For a few reasons.
1. This is just the first round.
When the Spanish flu traveled the globe for the first time, it appeared just another flavor of flu (we didn’t have the technology at the time, but now we know it was constructed, chemically, much like the swine flu today). It wasn’t until after mixing with other strains, increasing its virulence and deadliness, that the Spanish flu killed more people than World War I.
The Spanish flu had three rounds, as most do. The second and third were the worst, as they usually are with deadly outbreaks. In other words, the swine flu was a burgeoning threat last winter, but this winter is when we really find out what kind of killer it is. There’s no way to know which way H1N1 will break – towards greater virulence and more acute symptoms, or calming into a regular flu.
We do know, though, that people are preparing.
2. The swine flu is already a pandemic.
Contrary to popular belief, an pandemic doesn’t just mean something that leaves a path of destruction wherever it goes. No, in truth, a pandemic just means there no longer is any possibility of controlling the spread, and the spread will be rapid. The United States already has a million cases (and that was before the swine flu became pandemic). In the southern hemisphere or other spots where it’s currently flu season – like Thailand – there’s currently no way to stop the spread of this virus.
The best the authorities can do is react in piecemeal jerks – like locking down an entire city’s school system. This will help retard any outbreak… but it can no longer prevent further outbreaks. That’s quite important – more on that later.
The biggest problem with the current swine flu is humans have no natural immunity to it. This current version is a mix of the bird flu from a few years back, and two separate strains of swine flu. We’ve never encountered something like this before – so we don’t have any defenses. In short, not only is the spread going to be unchecked, but almost everyone exposed to it will likely catch it.
In the case of the Spanish flu, something like 25% of the world population caught it. The death toll is notoriously tricky to measure, but estimates have it from a low of 20 million, to over 200 million. Most scientists believe the true number was between 50 and 100 million.
3. The swine flu is already quite deadly.
Smarty-pants like to point out that the regular flu killed many, many more people last season than the swine flu. Of course it did – there were many, many, many more cases of the regular flu. It’s just a numbers game.
It’s worth remembering, though, that the regular flu kills about 2% of the people it infects – mostly those already weak, infirm, very young or very old. The swine flu, however, kills around 5% of those who get it – and the deaths tend to be young adults, prime-of-life types, because of something called a cytokine storm.
Basically, a cytokine storm is an overreaction of the body’s immune system. The virus is so damaging, and so uncontrollable, that the body launches a scorched earth campaign. Sadly, because they are healthy and with strong immune systems, young-adult bodies tend to kill themselves waging the war.
That’s exactly how the Spanish flu worked.
In fact, if you’re still skeptical of the similarities between the two, consider this – living survivors of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic are proving immune to the swine flu. It’s so similar, that the old antibodies produced to combat the Spanish flu also work on the swine flu.
All that’s worrying, but really, if only 1 out of 20 cases end up dying, that’s not that bad a kill rate, right? Well, consider the Spanish Flu killed about 1 out of every 40 in America – and the swine flu hasn’t yet realized its full potential – and you can see why smart scientists are still manning the klaxons.
Scary stuff indeed.
But all is not lost – as I’ll show you in Part two of the swine flu series, things aren’t as grim as they sound… and there’s plenty of money-making opportunities that are arising out of this scare. Stay tuned.
Good investing,
Ryan Cole
- Return of the Swine Flu: Part 2
- Markets Coming Down with Swine Flu
- GPS Killer: Google Rules Another Roost
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2 Responses to “Return of the Swine Flu: Part 1”
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July 23rd, 2009 at 12:42 pm
I’m wondering where you get the 5% fatality rate for swine flu.
So far, mortality for swine flu is between 0.4 and 1 percent, and that number does not take into account the significant portion of unreported cases that would normally figure into the denominator but don’t because they are unidentified.
See this link for a good rundown of numbers that will be taken into account when a more accurate case-fatality ratio is determined: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17466-swine-flu-death-rate-estimates-flawed.html
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August 14th, 2009 at 12:16 am
Contradiction in the article, he says one million American infected and hat was before it was pandemic, and then says the 5% death rate. By doing simple math, the 5% death rate should have resulted so far in 50,000 deaths in the US!!!!!! You can see clearly that the 5% is a total wrong figure and the rate is not even one tenth of this rate
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