Hans Rosling, of Gapminder fame, is one of my personal heroes. He is able to give clear context to important stories and I believe the mainstream news media should pay far more attention to what they are doing. His latest video puts swine flu into a much more sane context than I am getting from traditional media. It would be great if some of the media monitoring organisations would also start measuring stories with the news/death ratio.
During the last 13 days, up to May 6 2009, WHO has confirmed that 25 countries are affected by the Swine flu and 31 persons have died from Swine flu. WHO data indicates that about 60 000 persons died from TB during the same period. By a rough comparison with the number of news reports found by Google news search, Hans Rosling calculates a News/Death ratio and issue an alert for a media hype on Swine flu and a neglect of tuberculosis
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