A new study suggests the number of people who died from H1N1 pandemic flu in 2009 was similar to the annual toll taken by seasonal flu.
But the authors suggest the comparison is misleading because the people who died during the H1N1 pandemic were a lot younger than the people who succumb to seasonal flu.
Researchers suggest between 123,000 and 203,000 people died worldwide from pandemic flu in the final nine months of 2009. (Reed Saxon/Associated Press)
Lead author Lone Simonsen says that between 62 per cent and 85 per cent of people who died from pandemic flu in 2009 were under 65 years of age.
During typical flu seasons less than 20 per cent of deaths occur in people under age 65.
Simonsen says it's important to look at years-of-life lost, because simply counting deaths doesn't capture the full scope of the global outbreak.
Another finding of the study was that some parts of the world were far harder hit than others, with 20 times more deaths in the Americas than in Europe.
But why that is true remains unclear, says Simonsen, a professor in the school of public health at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
The study was published Tuesday in the journal PLoS Medicine, a publication of the U.S. Public Library of Science. The authors were from the U.S., the Netherlands, Britain and from the World Health Organization in Geneva.
The WHO reported 18,631 confirmed deaths in the 2009 pandemic, a startlingly low figure for a global event that had, when it first hit the world's radar, appeared to cause an alarming degree of severe disease.
But as the new virus moved from Mexico to other parts of the world, it became clear that this pandemic was not going to be like the Spanish Flu of 1918 or even the milder pandemic of 1957.
For this study, Simonsen and her co-authors looked at mortality data from 20 countries representing 35 per cent of the world's population. Using that data, they built a mathematical model to calculate global figures.
They suggest between 123,000 and 203,000 people died from pandemic flu in the final nine months of 2009. Their model suggests that for the four years preceding the pandemic, between 148,000 and 249,000 people a year died from seasonal flu.
But the authors say the paper likely substantially underestimates the total death toll for the 2009 pandemic. For one thing, says Simonsen, people continued to die from the pandemic strain into 2010 and even later.
And the team wasn't able to get mortality data for many parts of the world. They suggest the true death toll may have been in the 300,000 to 400,000 range.
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