Comments on: Due to corruption, Asia is in for a big swine flu year

By: Lee Duploy

Lee Duploy — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:11:00 +0000

WAITING IN THE WINGS.

Not to make light of something as serious as this potential epedemic, so I hope you will forgive me.

I saw Grafitti on a wall here in Hong Kong.

“Swine Flew which included a drawing of a pig with wings, to which someone added.
a drawing of a bird with wings ‘ bird flew”
I would like to think the artiist(s) knew the differnce between flew and flu.

lee du ploy HK

By: The “Best of Asia Healthcare Blog” and I’m done with blogging *regularly for a while | Asia Healthcare Blog

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:21:38 +0000

[...] real moment of triumph for us at Asia Healthcare Blog. A previous post – Due to corruption, Asia is in for a big swine flu year – analyzing H1N1 underreporting in Southeast Asia proved to be correct. Coincidentally, I [...]

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Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:59:34 +0000

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By: A quick “We told you so” update about Swine Flu in Asia | Asia Health Care Blog

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:17:10 +0000

[...] Due to corruption, Asia is in for a big swine flu year [...]

By: maverick

maverick — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:12:05 +0000

I think this is a cooked up article and bases of the argument is questionable. This is another typical example of imbalanced Asan mind to imitate their former colonial masters’ art of trade.

By: Asia is in for a Big Swine Flu Year - the Case for India | Asia Health Care Blog

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:51:50 +0000

[...] A few days ago I presented a case for the under reporting of swine flu cases in mainland Asia. I did not touch on India in that article, but as of July 20th it has only 112 confirmed cases of swine flu. This would put it well South of any reasonable predictions of swine flu prevalence. Reader, Tej Dehol, who doubles as editor of the very good Clearstate Health Blog sent in an article from May 2009, titled “India Prepared for Swine Flu Outbreak: WHO”. [...]

By: Damjan

Damjan — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:20:31 +0000

Great article. It provides what for me is a plausible explanation for the under-reporting of numbers – economic incentives.

I will keep a further eye on this, and post this up as well.

Thank you, Tej.

By: Damjan

Damjan — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:18:01 +0000

Hey Claire,

See response in the next post.

//D

By: Penny Zhu

Penny Zhu — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:09:29 +0000

I think the conclusion drawn based only on the frequencies of reported cases is biased. When drawing this conclusion, the author did not take into consideration other factors that may have affected the frequencies of H1N1 occurance at different countries. As we all know that H1N1 originated from US/Mexico and is an infectious disease and so far it is mostly transmitted from one person to another. If the path of transmission is effectively blocked, a country could very well protect itself from H1N1.

Take China as an example. Ever since H1N1 breakout, Chinese government has imposed strict control of disease monitoring at all international airport, monitoring all passengers coming from abroad, especially mexico and USA. Not only body temperatures were monitored right after arrival, passengers coming from mexico and US are required to quarantine themselves for one week before coming into frequent contact with other people. In addition, anybody reported to a hospital to have high temperature is checked for H1N1 immediately and quanrantined if results are positive. These actions have greatly hurdled the spread of H1N1 in China. So far, the Chinese government has proactively reported the disease on all major media channels (I have friends in China who watches New everyday). The reporting has been so exhaustive that it makes people think another SARS is coming although very few people were actually sick and died from this disease. The author’s claim that the government is covering the case numbers is not supported with any evidence and is not the right way to establishing one’s argument. Of course somebody would battle me about the quanrantine using the “Human rights issue”. However, if a country can not guard its citizen against deadly diseases, where would human rights lie upon?