CDC plays down high swine flu estimates
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Wednesday, August 26, 2009

ATLANTA — As many as 90,000 deaths from swine flu in the United States?

Monday, a White House advisory panel issued a report with that and other estimates, calling them "a plausible scenario" for a second wave of H1N1 flu.

Tuesday, however, officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency with the most expertise on influenza pandemics, suggested that the projections by the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology should be regarded with caution.

"We don't necessarily see this as a likely scenario," said Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

A press officer for the CDC said, "Look, if the virus keeps behaving the way it is now, I don't think anyone here expects anything like 90,000 deaths."

Even one of the experts who helped prepare the report said Tuesday that the numbers were probably on the high side, given that weeks had passed since the calculations were finished.

"As more data has come out of the Southern Hemisphere, where it seems to be fading, it looks as if it's going to be somewhat milder," said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and a panel chairman, defended the report.

"A lot of people think the flu is over," Varmus said. "We think it's important that there be a dose of reality."

A debate over alarming predictions would recall September 2005, when Dr. David Nabarro, then in charge of the U.N. response to avian flu, estimated that a human outbreak could kill 5 million to 150 million people.

But the flu never mutated to transmit easily between people, and so far only 262 deaths have been attributed to it by the World Health Organization.