Problem Finding, Department of

Not the virus. The news. The hypernews about shortage of flu shots. It was Ted Koppel on Nightline that really brought me to the crisis. He opened his story about the disastrous shortage of flu vaccine with pictures of elderly people standing in line for flu shots. Then he moved on to the used news that the flu kills 36,000 Americans a year. (I think he meant citizens of the U.S.) He seemed to think this terrible death toll was due to a lack of flu vaccine or a failure to use it. Naturally, he thought the government should spend more money on flu vaccine.

I quit listening right there because I know that this is a historical figure based on years in which we had plenty of flu vaccine. He might have been going to nag us about how negligent we are for not getting our flu shots. But I think most of us that are healthy and old enough to watch Nightline have our own assessment about flu and flu shots. My impression is that flu is not very serious for healthy people and flu shots are not very effective anyway.

So I did a little checking. There was some hypernews last year about the flu. There was another impending disaster then. What ever came of that? Did we survive?

I checked with Keepmedia.com, a convenient archive. It turns out that used news is just as thrilling as new news. Only the dateline is changed to protect the writers. Here are a few headlines:

Vaccine shortage may not hit most work places hard. USA Today, Oct 21, 2003
Flu Shot shortage is feared USA Today, Dec. 8, 2003
Flu and Fear run Rampant No one knows when tough season will end. USA Today, Dec. 10, 2003

But with used news, you can fast-forward. Two months later, the headline was:

Flu season: In like a lion, out like a lamb. USA Today, Feb 9, 2004.

One of the great benefits of hypernews is that you get to use it coming and going. Warn of the threat. Announce the rescue.

But perhaps we were saved at the last minute by the delivery of those flu shots..

Not at all: Flu shots had little effect. USA Today, Jan. 16, 2004.

Maybe that was just a fluke. Surely the flu shots have been effective on other years. I asked Google for this search: flu vaccine research effectiveness

By scanning a few articles, I found figures suggesting that flu shots are generally found to be 35% to 55% effective. I also found articles concluding that the shots are not cost-effective for businesses in general. Apparently only about 10% of the population gets the flu in any given year. (More may have flu-like symptoms, but not the flu.)

So what do I conclude about this problem. Personally, I will not bother to get a flu shot this year. I’m 75 and technically eligible, but I am healthy and have never been sick more than 3 days with the flu. I’d rather take the 10% risk than stand in line for two hours.

But flu wasn’t the real problem here. The real problem was newshype. And I wouldn’t even call that a problem if it persuaded people to get flu shots when they are readily available. I figure there is roughly a 5% chance of benefiting (based on 10% incidence and 50% effectiveness). Not great, but better than the lottery. But newshype is irresponsible when it has elderly people standing in line for hours to get a shot that will probably do them no good. Elderly or not, if they can stand in line for 2 hours, they are probably healthy enough to fight off the flu.

So how do I deal with the problem of newshype? I wash my hands carefully, turn off the TV news, and read my Pluck feed from MyYahoo. I become a hypespotter and skip that stuff. Or follow it for my daily dose of skepticism, as I did with the beginning of Nightline.

I wish Yahoo or Google would provide a hypefilter for news. They find news items on subjects I am interested in. A hypefilter would filter out news on subjects I am not interested in. They could even use it to generate a news group: the five most frequently filtered news subjects.