# 3248
John Oxford, that is.
Who happens to be a virologist of some note, and is the Scientific Director of Retroscreen Virology Ltd. Oxford also serves as a Professor of Virology at St Bartholomew’s and the Royal London Hospital, Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry.
He takes great exception today of the `official’ numbers of H1N1 infections currently in the UK, and believes the real number is several hundred times larger than is being admitted.
The criteria for testing in the UK is very limited, and there has been much criticism over `artificially low’ numbers being reported by the NHS (see H1N1 In Europe: Hiding In Plain Sight?) along with other European nations.
This report from The Independent.
UK swine flu toll is really 30,000, says leading scientist
True extent of the outbreak is claimed to be 300 times worse than government agency admits
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 24 May 2009
Thirty thousand people in Britain are likely to have been already infected by swine flu, one of the country's leading authorities has told The Independent on Sunday. This would mean that the virus is 300 times more widespread than the Health Protection Agency (HPA) admits.
The startling estimate by top virologist Professor John Oxford comes as leading scientists are warning that the agency's announcements on the spread of the disease are "meaningless" and hiding its true extent. And it tallies with official estimates made in the United States.
Yet the World Health Organisation (WHO) late last week changed its rules in order to avoid declaring that the flu has become a pandemic after pleas from governments, led by Britain.
Professor Oxford, of Queen Mary, University of London, believes that thousands of people have caught the virus and suffered only the most minor symptoms, or none at all, over the past weeks, as the new strain of H1N1 has spread nationwide – welcome testimony to the mildness of the epidemic to date.
He also thinks that some 100,000 people will have been infected in the US – the same number as is being privately estimated by experts at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – and another 30,000 in Japan, where swine flu was spreading rapidly last week.
This contrasts with the number of officially tested and confirmed cases recorded by the WHO, which now stands at 11,168 in 42 countries on every continent except Africa. So far just 86 deaths have been ascribed to the disease, all of them in North and Central America, including 75 in Mexico.
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If the title of this blog sounds vaguely familiar, it is taken from the 1938 MGM comedy A Yank At Oxford, starring Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore, Maureen O'Sullivan and Vivien Leigh.
In `American’, giving someone `a yank’ can mean jarring, jolting, or pulling someone up short.
These plays on words amuse me, but I know they must mystify some of my readers from time to time. Sorry about that.
