2009 part 5: Swine Flu

Swine Flu rocked the world for a while there. The disease is still infecting people at an accelerated rate (at the time of writing there are 1.4 million cases including 24,000 recorded deaths attributed to the disease worldwide), but you don’t hear about it as much anymore because, well, we all kind of got bored with it.

I was running a leader board of swine flu tallies for a while there including multiple posts mocking the disease, but then I found out about a mate’s mother dying due to complications brought on by the disease, so decided to put that series to rest.

This final take on the subject will include a list of the 10 most afflicted countries (from stats that were updated on the 9th of feb), just to show how swine flu numbers have leapt dramatically in a few countries. Australia was a front-runner for the swine flu epidemic, but now it looks like we will drop out of the top 10 within a month or two. Nice to see China finally stop lying about their numbers. Too bad north Korea doesn’t follow suit – South Korea is reporting over 100,000 cases, while the North is reporting 50. Yeah right. Even Micronesia owned up to 79.

GERMANY: 215,881
PORTUGAL: 166,922
CHINA: 120,940
SOUTH KOREA: 108,234
BELGIUM: 76,973
MEXICO: 69,824
BRAZIL: 58,178
UKRAINE: 57,862
USA: 44,640
AUSTRALIA: 37,642

In the last few months I’ve read of Swine Flu II scares, and how a group of vets caught Horse Flu. No news of Squirrel AIDs as of writing, but I’m quite happy to leave these animal flus to the annals of 2009.


Next post: The 2009 Neck Up Awards part 1.