The swine flu virus, H1N1, may have killed 15 times the number of people counted by the World Health Organization, according to a new study. And unlike the seasonal flu, the H1N1 pandemic struck down mostly young people, many living in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Beginning in 2009, the virus swept the globe, and the WHO counted 18,500 swine flu deaths that had been confirmed by laboratory tests. But according to new estimates from researchers at the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the virus probably killed between 105,700 and 400,000 people around the world in its first year alone, and an additional 46,000 to 179,000 people likely died of cardiovascular complications from the virus.
That's a pretty wide gap in death rates, but it's not unusual. The numbers of flu deaths confirmed by lab tests usually understate how many people actually died from the virus, simply because most doctors around the world don't have the time or the resources to test their patients for the virus and report cases to health authorities.
"This is a problem year in and year out, from London to Nairobi," said Dr. William Schaffer, chair of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Centre. "It's so difficult to test everyone with influenza."
The problem is greater in countries with few medical resources.
"In some countries, data on influenza are quite sparse or nonexistent," said Dr. Fatimah Dawood, the study's lead author. And she said even if a patient is tested, sometimes the virus might not even be detectable.
The study, published today in the medical journal The Lancet, is the first attempt to provide a global estimate of how many deaths actually occurred during the first year of the swine flu pandemic.
Read More: Yahoo GMA..
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