Ten times more deaths than the estimate made by the WHO at the time of the epidemic, it is the new balance sheet of the 2009 influenza pandemic which would have killed between 200,000 and 400,000 people.
203,000 people are believed to have died worldwide from the H1N1 flu and these respiratory complications. This is what reveals this Wednesday, a new study commissioned by WHO and published in the journal Plos Medecine. This new estimate concerning the famous pandemic would be 10 times greater than what the WHO had announced at the time of the crisis. Indeed, the official count of 2009 reported 18,449 deaths linked to the H1N1 virus confirmed in the laboratory. Moreover, this figure of 203,000 could even be an underestimate, since it relates only to the deaths from respiratory disease related to an influenza infection that year.
A toll that could reach 400,000 deaths
Indeed, the authors of this study explain that the real toll could even reach the 400,000 deaths attributable to this pandemic, if one counts in particular the people who died of heart failure following influenza infection. In addition, the researchers responsible for this new analysis confirm that the deaths mainly affected the young population. “The flu usually kills people between the ages of 70 and 80. Here, all the deaths we are talking about are mostly young adults. It is therefore a very heavy bill in terms of years of life lost, ”explains Dr. Lone Simonsen, author of this study, to medical web radio MD-FM.
European researchers speechless at this report
The estimated death toll in this new study closely matches that of another analysis released in June 2012 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The latter, based on preliminary data, estimated that 201,000 people had died from the flu and respiratory problems and 83,000 from heart problems. In addition, these results are based on mortality data from 26 countries, and show that the people most seriously affected were those living in the Americas, while conversely the European countries, New Zealand and the United States. Australia were more or less spared.
“The important thing that we have to remember for a possible new pandemic is that we have to be vigilant that it can strike differently in different parts of the world. This time it was particularly severe in Mexico or Argentina, but Europeans wondered why so much commotion when they did not feel the impact, adds Lone Simonsen. When we show our results, European researchers are speechless because they did not expect such a result ”. The conclusion of this study therefore shows that during an international pandemic, the number of deaths can be very heterogeneous. The toll can be up to 20 times more catastrophic in some countries compared to others.
Researchers are now trying to explain the reasons for these regional differences. “That’s the big question now, we’ll try to find the factors that might explain these differences. The one so we’re already pretty sure is that the age pyramid of a given population matters. Countries where the proportion of young adults was high had a much higher mortality during this pandemic. But we are also looking for other factors, ”concludes Dr. John Paget, co-author of this study.
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