Press Brief ing T ranscript Dr. Thomas Frieden's Remarks at the 2010 Influenza Workshop for Journalists Monday, August 23, 2010 DR. FRIEDEN: Well, good afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon. I-I thought I would just speak informally for just a few minutes, then ha ve time for discussion questions. The media's role in H1N1 was e xtremely important because, ultimately, disease response is about human behavior, and human behavior is about what people understand and how they thinkabout something. The more ± the better informed people are, we feel, the better choices they can make for themselves to protect themselves and t heir communi ties. And t hat's why we feel that one of our roles is to have sessions like this, to provide you w ith inf ormation as it is occurring and to be clear from the day ± from day one one of any event²what we know, what we don't know²of what we kno w, what the implications of that are for what people shou ld do, and of we don't ± of what we don't know, how we're trying to find out and when we might know. I-I would say that, looking back at last year, there's one big issue that I think is important to frame, and that's, "Was the pandemic mild?" And I think you will hear many people saying this was a mil d wave or a mild flu season. And certainly, compared to 1918, it was very mild. Compared to an average flu season, it's far from clear that it was mild in that sense. And one o f the things that gets discussed a lot is the number o f deaths per year from flu. And the number you generally hear, as a ± as an estimate, is 36,000 a year. There are a few things you should know about that number. One is it's an estimate. T wo is it's an average. So, some years may be many fewer. S ome years may be more. And three is, it's a combination of two diff erent t ypes of death, one that's directly related to flu and one t hat's indirectly related to flu. And the directly related to flu is easier to identify, but both o f them require estimates. They're models. They're our best guess ±educated, sophisticated, but still ultimately an estimate o f the number of deaths. And you'll sometimes hear people say, "Well, an ± an average flu season kills 36,000 people. H1N1 only killed about 13,000 people in CDC's latest estimate. So, obviously it was much milder." It's apples to oranges. First off, that 13,000 estimate is o nly of direct deaths, not of indirect deaths, and there are generally more indirect deaths than death ± than direct deaths. And second, it's done with a different methodology. So, you can't compare even the direct component of the 36,000 with the 13,000 number for H1N1. One way to look at it, though, is to look at ± we know that H1N1 affected people under the age ± young people much more than an average flu season. And our best guess is that, for both children and younger adults under the age of 50 or 60, there were about five ± at least five times as many flu deaths last year as during an average flu season. So, I-I don't think that by ± by that token you can really say it was a mild pandemic. But looking back to the past year and a half, I think many things went very well. The communication that we had with media I believe went quite well. We pro vided information regularly before my joining CDC. And a fter my joining here, Dr. Schuchat, who you know well, was there regularly. Rich Besser was the Act ing Director at the outset and all did really a
