Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Cheese and the Onion
Are the only two things I know about the state of Wisconsin. But now, a third factoid - according to the CDC, it is the USA's capital of swine flu, with 2217 confirmed and suspected cases, thrashing Texas's meagre 1670 and California's 973. Not having a large population or a land frontier with Mexico hasn't stopped those plucky Wisconsiners - they're going down with it like ninepins. Roughly 10% of all the swine flu cases in the world are in Wisconsin - it has half as many as Mexico, and is gaining market share - between 1 June and 8 June, 1 in 6 new cases in the WHO data were attributable to Wisconsin. Does anyone have the foggiest idea why this might be the case, other than the obvious explanation that something's up with the reporting system? I checked whether Wisconsin was a big pig producer and discovered a) that the US pork industry likes crappy recipe-laden trade association websites in bright colours a lot more than it likes statistics and b) eventually that no it isn't, it's 17th biggest in the Union, which given the cluster of desert states and tiny urban ones means it's solid mid-table. Also, North Carolina and Virginia (homes of the real pork powerhouses don't seem to have very many cases at all.
Any ideas?
(by the way, the CDC reckons that there are actually 100,000 cases of swine flu in the USA rather than the 13,217 "confirmed and suspected" cases. In other words, they reckon that the passive reporting system in place undercounts swine flu by a factor of roughly 8. Veterans of the Lancet/Iraq debate will not be surprised.
this item posted by the management 6/09/2009 02:10:00 PM
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