What were they thinking?

At a June 26  CDC press briefing, Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, took the agency's number of verified cases (over 27,000) of H1N1 ('swine flu') and extrapolated them into a much higher number. 

Having dealt with the press previously and on numerous occasions, Schuchat must have anticipated the resulting headlines, and the ensuing panic.

Here's what she said: 

"We're saying there have been at least a million cases of this new H1N1 virus in the United States so far this year. That's really not a perfectly accurate estimate.  It's just a number, a ballpark figure, that we think for sure there's been more than a million of these new infections."

As if that "not perfectly accurate," "we think for sure" statement wasn't enough to guarantee headlines, when asked for clarification Schuchat said she believed the number probably exceeded 1 million.

I think that was irresponsible, especially since Schuchat said most  hospitals and clinics don't have the means to test and classify virus samples.

"Fortunately, we have a new test that can be done in state and public health laboratories that can differentiate this new virus from other viruses but there's really not the sufficient number of those tests or the capacity in terms of the people to do those tests to test every single person who has an influenza-like illness," she said.

Doctors may have an extra busy day Monday morning dealing with the added people who come in clamoring for a flu shot that doesn't yet exist.

Oh well. At least a dozen or more companies (already paid billions by our government) in a half dozen countries are in a race to develop the first commercial swine flu vaccine. Some say they have created doses that are ready for testing on animals. May the best man win.

And may we not have a repeat of the 1976 debacle when public health officials vaccinated 40 million Americans to ward off a new flu strain, also called "swine flu" with a largely untested vaccine. The anticipated swine flu pandemic never occurred but at least 500 people who got the vaccine developed Guillain-Barre Syndrome, an often deadly neurological disorder for which there is no cure.