I will not deny that I was tempted to be a little flippant with this post, because there seems to be a little bit of panic in the air about swine flu.  This dinky little blog attracted huge numbers of hits over the bank holiday weekend (and hits are generally down at weekends, moreso on bank holidays) all driven by various searches relating to swine flu in Wandsworth.

The fact is you, personally, probably don’t have swine flu.  Around a 1,000 cases have been identified world wide, but this is in a population of around 6,000,000,000.  In the UK the figures are 27 from nearly 70,000,000.  Bringing it down to Wandsworth the figures are 3 in 280,000.  And all those three are from the same family.

The school and nursery closed in Wandsworth – the Dolphin School and Noah’s Ark Nursery – closed themselves as a precaution, rather than on the advice of NHS Wandsworth, the council or anyone else.  Anyone who may have been in close contact are being identified and offered anti-virals.

Swine flu remains a risk, so the ‘catch it, bin it, kill it’ advice remains good, but we’re still some way away from the sensationalist headlines we have seen.

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