Each swine flu death received 82,000 times more attention than each equally tragic death from TB.

Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Ronnlund.  Page 133.

Tuberculosis and Swine Flu

It is not only bears and axes that the news media gets out of proportion.

In 1918 the Spanish flu killed around 2.7 percent of the world population. The risk of an outbreak of a flu against which we have no vaccine remains a constant threat, which we should all take extremely seriously. In the first months of 2009, thousands of people died from the swine flu. For two weeks it was all over the news. Yet, unlike with Ebola in 2014, the number of cases did not double. It did not even go up in a straight line. I and others concluded this flu was not as aggressive as the first alarm had indicated. But journalists kept the fear boiling for several weeks.

Finally I got tired of the hysteria and calculated the rate of news reports versus fatalities. Over a period of two weeks, 31 people had died from swine flu, and a news search on Google brought up 253,442 articles about it. That was 8,176 articles per death. Over the same two-week period, I calculated that roughly 63,066 people had died of tuberculosis (TB). Almost all these people were on Levels 1 and 2, where TB remains a major killer even though it can now be treated. But TB is infectious and TB strains can become resistant and kill many people on Level 4. The news coverage for TB was at a rate of 0.1 article per death. Each swine flu death received 82,000 times more attention than each equally tragic death from TB.