“Significantly more people get the flu than get West Nile Virus. As of August, there were just over a thousand WNV cases—still in the range where cases can still be counted accurately.”
Which means they are NOT counting flu cases. WNV is tested for. Flu is *estimated*. What’s suspicious is the lack of background information and data available that they supposedly used to make that estimate.
Kind of like the global warming *estimates* we get from another government ‘institution’, NASA. All based on models that can be constructed to give whatever answer the modeler wants. Global temperatures on target for 5C rise over the next century. Trust us! Except we won’t tell you exactly HOW we modeled that (trade secret!) OR allow you to have the original raw data. But trust us. If you question us all the little baby polar bears will drown!
As always, I taught college. I failed kids who didn’t ‘show their work’. If we can’t know their methods or have the data their results are irreproducible. And can be published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. This is not a high status journal. They aren’t allowing even rudimentary peer review.
I have a right to know. Apparently they think somehow their data is subject to ‘national security’.
Why is their method some great big secret? BTW, one of the guys I know who’s foia’d the requests TAUGHT at a local med school. Apparently they think he’s too stupid to ‘properly interpret’ their study. He thinks the flu shot is a scam too.
Neither you, nor I, have any way of knowing whether or not the department secretary pulled that number out of her belly button to make the report page correctly. It wouldn’t be the FIRST time big government agencies have been caught with the pants down this way.
And at least one study has linked vitamin D3 to incidence of influenza:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20219962?dopt=Citation
Yes, they did a study comparing vitamin d to placebo, but they only gave the study kids 1200 iu! Imagine how much better the results would have been if they gave them 4000 iu. (The placebo kids did have double the cases as it was, but I would bet very few would even catch the flu with a therapeutic dose.
Here is how I figured dosing a child of average size (for this purpose, call average size wearing the size clothing that matches his age). From birth, one drop on mom’s or bottle nipple of 400 iu a day. Double if ill. From 2, 1000 iu a day, double if acutely ill. From 4, 2000 iu a day. From 6, 4000 iu a day until puberty, then 5000 iu a day or get tested until your blood registers at least 50. Adults should be tested. I need 10,000 iu a day.
We don’t get sick and we do get exposed to all kids of flus and colds.
Flu is tested, but it is cost-prohibitive to test every single person for flu. People who don't go to the doctor don't get tested; only a portion of those who make outpatient visits are tested. Those who end up hospitalized are always tested. Out of necessity, the number of people who get the flu and do not seek medical attention *must* be estimated through various methods; there simply is no way to count them. But, for the other flu patients, statistical analyses are completely adequate for deriving the number of flu cases. For the purpose of documenting flu incidence, all patients visiting certain facilities and who meet certain criteria are tested. From that, the incidence of flu is determined and used to extrapolate the number of flu cases among all patients in that area presenting with flu like symptoms. If you examined the CDC weekly flu link I provided earlier, that is how they determine those numbers.
The WNV rates are determined only from people who seek medical attention. To get a full picture of WNV incidence, a statistically significant number of the general population in the outbreak area needs to be tested for seroconversion, and the seroconversion rate can be used to estimate how many cases there actually were. It could be that everyone who gets WNV is so sick they go to the doctor, but there could also be a large number of people who never get that sick. I don't know, because I haven't read everything about the current WNV outbreak, and the seroconversion studies take a while to conduct anyway. Flu rates are also determined through seroconversion studies.
The public health data is not typically publicized, but it's available through the CDC site, and more detailed study reports are databased in PubMed. The methodology is also available through those agencies. Nothing is deliberately hidden about methodologies or disease rates; the CDC wants that information to be available because very few researchers or medical professionals actually work for the CDC, but they need that information.