The current flu epidemic and other acute respiratory diseases in Ukraine has claimed 344 lives by Wednesday evening, the Health Ministry said.
It said 18 people had died of such diseases in the previous 24 hours.
The ministry said 1.502 million people had contracted such illnesses since the epidemic broke out and that 44,781 had fallen ill in the past 24 hours.
A total of 83,904 people have been hospitalized since the start of the epidemic, and 54,407 of them have been discharged from the hospital by Wednesday evening.
The ministry also said 2,878 people had been hospitalized for the previous 24 hours.
The ministry has published no separate statistics on cases of A/H1N1 influenza or swine flu.That last line is the problem: If H1N1 is lumped in with "other acute respiratory diseases," we have no idea what's really going on. If anything, the large and precise numbers make me suspicious.
Meanwhile, the latest ECDC Surveillance Update reports exactly 15 H1N1 deaths in Ukraine, along with 7 in Belarus and 19 in Russia. But it also gives Brazil's death total as 1,368, a statistic at least a month out of date.
WHO's second Ukraine update, published on November 17, gave no statistics at all, saying only that the samples taken in Ukraine show "no significant changes" from H1N1 samples taken elsewhere in the world.
I realize that WHO can't be too candid about the conditions in a country that's politically unstable and lacking a solid healthcare system. I also realize that various interested parties are using the pandemic for political purposes.
The people warning about "pneumonic plague" and "hemorrhagic flu" don't seem to have much evidence to back them up. But outside experts like WHO and ECDC don't seem to have much evidence either--at least, evidence they're willing to make public.
So until someone shows up with reliable statistics and no political ax to grind, I'm going to treat all reports out of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia with considerable skepticism.
