Fears of another impending health crisis were accentuated today as news stories threaten “ Flu virus could kill 81 million .”

These latest death threat statistics, reported from the same press release, appear to have been created for the greatest scare value, according to Steve Milloy. In a Fox News article, he reviewed the flaws in how those numbers were derived, along with some valuable cautionary science:

...First, the researchers’ estimate of 62 million deaths has far more shock-value than credibility....The 62 million-death sound-bite is the product of statistical modeling that uses worst-case death rate estimates from the 1918-1920 pandemic influenza – an epidemic that medical historians believe killed somewhere between 20 million to 100 million people.

[T]he researchers ignored several key (not to mention glaring) differences between 1918 and 2006. First...modern medical care and public health practices have dramatically improved since 1918. So any flu epidemic is likely to be far less severe....Next, a great proportion of the deaths in 1918 was probably due to secondary bacterial infections that followed the initial viral infections. Today, antibiotics would be used to treat bacterial infections.

And let’s not forget that during 1918-1920, much of the world was still recovering from the strains of World War I. Poverty, hunger, unsanitary living conditions and stress likely made much of the global population ripe for a killer flu pandemic.

None of these considerations were factored into the researchers’ estimate.

But perhaps the researchers’ choice that most reveals their apparent desire to come up with a scary – rather than a realistic – death toll from pandemic flu is their decision to use the 1918 pandemic flu data in the first place. There were, after all, two other more recent and, in all likelihood, more relevant pandemic flu outbreaks in the 20th century....

While scares about a global bird flu pandemic have been brewing for years, the “shock we are seeing is way out of proportion to the risk,” said Anni McLeod, a senior officer of livestock policy for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. “Consumers are not very much at risk from this disease,” she said at a World Poultry conference in May.

Infectious disease and agricultural scientists have been presenting science that tempers concerns for years, but it’s been underplayed in the media. Fostering fears of a crisis is too irresistible for a host of interests, from public health officials creating new emergency management programs, activists trying to frighten consumers away from animal products and modern farming, pharmaceutical companies and researchers seeking funding for vaccines, and media garnering readership and viewers with sensational headlines.