Misinformation can be as dangerous as the virus

It is understandable why the media tends to rely on numbers: they are concrete, they are concise and precise. They are neat enough to put into the headlines. Numbers are also good indicators of the “late-breakingness” of news: The biggest ones make for the latest updates.

The problem with numbers is that while a number may be worth a thousand words, these words can be misleading when the number is taken out of context.

7,000 deaths is apparently a significant number, almost three times the 2,416 casualties of the Sept. 21 Earthquake that occurred a decade ago. Such number inevitably adds a tone of emergency to the pundits' proclamations which in turn instills a sense of fear in the people.

While the seven-million estimation, made by Taiwan's former top health official, Chen Chien-jen, based on the calculations of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the 7,000 deaths based on his “conservative” assumption of the A(H1N1) flu's death rate (0.1 percent) are sound, they can present a distorted picture of the situation when they are used without one key piece of information: over how long?

As the current health minister Yaung Chih-liang pointed out in a rare press conference to rebuff the abundance of misinformation in the media, even if the A(H1N1) virus maintains a high infection rate of 30,000 per week, which is unlikely, it would take over four years for the number to reach 7 million. The 7,000 death rate is therefore a four year tally at most.

According to the WHO, 250,000 to 500,000 people in the world die from seasonal influenza, the “normal” flu, every year. According to Taiwanese data, seasonal flu kills about 2,000 people per year. In four years, the statistical death toll of seasonal flu in Taiwan has been 8,000.

That does not mean that the A(H1N1) flu should be taken lightly. While seasonal flu-triggered pneumonia generally causes death to infants and the infirm, the new strain is most fatal for adults in their 30s to 50s.

It is exactly because the A(H1N1) flu is a challenge to reckon with that the media should handle high numbers with great care. The contention that it is passable to run sensational information as long as it helps raise people's attention to the pandemic is false because misquoted information only distracts people from learning the right facts about flu prevention.

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