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Swine Flu Kills Obese People Disproportionately
Philip K Dickhead writes "Bloomberg is reporting that the World Health Organization discovered a single, surprising characteristic that's emerged among swine flu victims who become severely ill: They are all fat. Infected people with a body mass index greater than 40 suffer respiratory complications that are harder to treat and can be fatal. The virus appears to be on a collision course with the obesity epidemic. WHO officials are gathering statistics to confirm and understand this development. 'It's very likely that if we went back retrospectively and looked at people who did poorly during seasonal flu, what would shake out is that obesity would be one of the risks.' Fat cells secrete chemicals that cause chronic, low-level inflammation that can hamper the body's immune response and narrow the airways, says Tim Armstrong, a doctor working in the WHO's chronic diseases department in Geneva."
Being obese is pretty much an invitation for all sorts of problems. I love my steak, fries, chocolate, soda and burgers, I just eat them once every other week in small quantities. It helps when I think of baby carrots and apples as snacks.
BMI is a bogus and misleading measure. Try percent body fat instead.
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"Morbid obesity is one of the most common findings turning up in severely ill patients," said Nikki Shindo, who is leading the investigation of swine flu patients at the WHO in Geneva. "It's a huge problem."
That is just wrong.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Pig flu affects fat persons.. I didn't see that one coming!
This surprises me not at all - people who are overweight generally are not eating that well, and also not exercising a lot.
I've been lucky to have a good metabolism and never really had weight issues. But I used to drink a ton of soda, and not eat that great... I was having combing down with the cold and flu multiple times per year.
Now I'm eating much better, drinking mostly water, and exercising a few times a week. I get at most about one cold a year now, and even that is not as bad as the worst of the colds I used to get.
One aspect of the flu I did think was odd was how so many cases were in Mexico... when I feel like I'm perhaps going to get a cold, I often eat spicy food and it seems to knock it out of me. I would think they have a lot spicier stuff in most Mexican's diets than elsewhere.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Come on, the BMI they are recording is over 40 - categorized as "morbidly obese". The only people not actually very overweight that would hit that would be professional weight lifters...
For just seeing if someone is a touch overweight it's not a great tool. But in this case the observation is perfectly valid.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Makes you wonder just how much this nations spends annually on corn and soy subsidies and just how much we will pay in the future as more and more people become sickly due to the low price of the poor nutrition that they are often offered. What if we got rid of those agricultural subsidies? How will that affect the cost of McDonalds', Wendys', etc. foods?
Perhaps it's not so much that H1N1 affects obese people more than others, but that obesity is a sign of bad health generally?
If so, then the correlation would be "unhealthy people more likely to develop respiratory complications that are harder to treat and can be fatal".
Doesn't roll off the tongue like "swine flu kills fatties" though.
A Human Right
It isn't killing them disproportionally - it's killing them in direct relationship to their proportions :-)
I previously believed Swine Flu was created by pigs to get revenge for people eating too much bacon. Now it's confirmed. Can I have a Nobel Prize now?
Immolation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I would be going to be very politically incorrect here, but people that are medically obese suffer a wide variety of ailments. If swine flu is what finally motivates these people to seek and complete treatment, why is this a bad thing? Or shall we continue to scream about the oppression of our right to be fat, forgetting that the virus doesn't give two sh--s either way.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"waste to hip ratio?" Is that measured in grams of feces per day over number of Apple products owned?
Summary: "They are all fat."
Article: "They are fat. [...] In Canada's Manitoba province, three out of five people treated for the new flu strain in intensive care units are obese."
If this virus killed only fat people that would be astounding. If it kills more than it's share of fat people, that's still interesting (despite all the "being fat is bad duh!" comments here) but less flashy.
Or they are labeled by the year (1918 flu, 1956 flu, and 1968 flu).
I agree. We've used science to keep people alive that just should have died off a long time ago. People like Stephen Hawking, for instance. What a drag on the gene pool he's been.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
What isn't clear from TFA, and seems to be the crux of whether this is a story or not, is whether this particular flu is affecting obese people disproportionately as compared to similar influenzas. If all strains of flu have the same pattern and are more severe (by whatever measure) in obese people, then there's nothing interesting here. If, on the other hand, the correlation between BMI and severity is much higher for this H1N1, that's a potential clue, one that might tell us something about (a) how this particular virus works, which could be useful in developing treatments for everyone, and/or (b) how obesity affects immune response, which could be helpful in the treatment of other infectious diseases. But, alas, TFA gives only anecdotal evidence so we can't even speculate.
.sig withheld by request
Clearly this is a terrorist act targeting Americans!
Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.
the term itself is misleading, the virus strand might have originated from swine, but the current flu has nothing to do with pigs. The proper term should be Influenza A (H1N1)
My only chance is to filter my air through this huge pile of empty pie wrappers!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
By the same token, I found the subject/headline a bit ironic. It sounds to me like the swine flu kills obese people proportionally. The article even discusses approximately what the proportions are, and about what proportions you have to have to qualify (usually due to pro-portioning at the buffet...)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Pandemic means spread, not severity. Dr. Mercola suggests concerns about the swine flu may be overblown. See: ... As of June 12, 2009, 74 countries have officially reported 29,669 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infection and only 145 deaths in the ENTIRE world from this illness. The United States has had 13217 confirmed cases, and 27 deaths. Mexico has had less cases but still has the majority of the deaths at 108. ... BUT to keep this in perspective the regular flu, not the swine flu, has killed 13,000 in the US since January. But there is strong support that these types of figures are grossly exaggerated to increase vaccine sales. However, the fact remains that the regular flu at this point in time is FAR more dangerous than the swine flu and were you worried about the regular flu before the media started talking this up?"
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/04/29/Swine-Flu.aspx
"To put things into perspective, malaria kills 3,000 people EVERY DAY, and it's considered "a health problem"... But of course, there are no fancy vaccines for malaria that can rake in billions of dollars in a short amount of time
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Everything kills obese people disproportionately. Heart attacks, liver disease, cancer, pneumonia, you name it. Flu is just one more thing, and Swine Flu is just one more flu.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
> Swine Flu Collides With Fat Epidemic ...could mean a significant decrease in methane emissions, and possibly even a measurable reduction in global warming.
Really. Did anyone, even the submitter, read the article? Stupid question in these parts, but come on - this is science. We're nerds. Where's the critical thinking people? First off, they are not all fat. The only numbers they quote in the article is 3 of 5 seriously ill people in Manitoba who are obese. 60% != 100%. Not by a long shot. The article goes on to say that the evidence is anecdotal and cites the very specious fact that the first two people to die of swine flu in Europe were from Scotland and Scotland is the most obese country in Europe. Lovely. That evidence can also be used to support my theory, which is that swine flu only affects peoples with difficult to understand accents. Manitobans, Mexicans, the Scottish and children from New York. And while I'm at it correllation does not imply causation. Although they mention it briefly in the article they downplay it as much as possible. To say nothing about stuff like sample size. But hey, what the hell. Who needs stuff like science! What's that ever done for us?
eat less
exercise more
that's it. that's the magic. everything else is bloviating
everything else is a giant game of rationalization, victimization, and other psychological manipulations, internal and external
again: eat less, exercise more. end of story
cut the fat, in your thinking as well as on your body
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So what you're saying is that we should have genuine concern (fair enough) over anything that's new (eek!) to people. That's a recipe for trouble, if nothing else.
Flu, especially swine flu, isn't *all* that serious in terms of pretty much any measure you want to put out there. It really isn't. Let's say that this one particular strain (which has, inevitably, grown from the usual strains with a slight mutation and which we expect to happen VERY quickly to ALL such viruses, every single day) will *kill* your "couple of hundred thousand" in, say, the next year and pick some completely random passages from Wikipedia on death rates (I leave actually verifying those data to other people... never trust another person's data). Hell, compare it to a MILLION swine flu deaths within the year, if you want.
"Of the roughly 150,000 people who die each *day* across the globe, about two thirds 100,000 per *day* die of age-related causes." (that's 36.5m a year, and those people might have swine flu and will thus be included in swineflu statistics for no reason other than they "had" it near the time of their death). ... approximately one to three *million* deaths annually." (see above)
"One such disease is tuberculosis, a bacterial disease which killed 1.7 million people in 2004." (Note the year - TB killed MORE people in a very recent year despite being around for decades - did you panic about that at the time?)
"Malaria causes
"AIDS death toll in Africa may reach 90-100 million by 2025."
"Tobacco smoking killed 100 million people worldwide in the 20th century and could kill 1 billion people around the world in the 21st century, the WHO Report warned." (One billion in a century - that's 10m a year and we're talking about THIS century, when everyone is "giving up" smoking for health reasons).
So let's say that the above are "true" and that your hypothetical scenario where hundreds of thousands of people across the globe start dying within the YEAR of swine flu (an increase of several orders of magnitude over the current scenario). That's absolutely NEGLIGIBLE (don't try for the "human" aspect - of course any single death is devastating, but you have to put these things in context) in the grand scheme of things, even against diseases that we have perfectly good existing medicine for and also those conditions that are currently incurable.
Swine flu is, statistically speaking, an interesting little blip on the low end of the radar - the rest of the signal is almost 99.9% diseases that are much more scary, prevelant, existing and that we know *lots* more about - some are even man-made problems like tobacco smoking. You've fallen for statistical propoganda with zero understanding of statistics. It's nothing to be ashamed of, so has *everyone* else I've heard mention swine flu in the last few months.
Just for fun:
http://news.scotsman.com/ViewArticle.aspx?articleid=2500903
67,000 people are injured each year trying to peel the cellophane off a packet of sandwiches, open a ready meal or open a ring-pull can.
More than 150 people a day - have accidentally stabbed themselves when trying to prise the top off a jar or opening a ready meal with a knife
A total of 379,000 injuries caused by trainers, high heels, sandals, platforms and countless other types of footwear.
I'll leave you to read through the rest of the statistics in that article and I'm fairly sure a lot of them are UK-only statistics.
FFS... THIRTY SEVEN PEOPLE were injured by tea cosies in 1999, so seriously that they were admitted to hospital. Do you know what a tea cosy is? It's a woolen warmer for a teapot. More people were injured by tea cosies in the UK than have died from swine flu here so far. Does that put it into perspective for you?
You are clearly understating the size of the portion you are eating (willingly or unconsciously). Conservation of energy (and therefor conservation of mass since no nuclear process is involved) tells me that the fat/weight you accumulate is directly linked by the amount of nutriment you are extracting from food, minus what you use up during the day and/or exhale and execrate. So yes, if you are eating what people call MODERATE portion, and have even a sedentary life, maybe you would take on weight but very slowly. Over 6 months for example I took in the last 10 years in average half a Kg to a Kg. So yeah over ten years I became slightly overweight (90Kg instead of my preferred ~80Kg). But after losing weight, getting back the same or more than that over 6 month with moderate portion is not possible. Once can only guess that what you call moderate is not what the average person would call moderate.
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