From Flu Wiki 2

Forum: Case Fatality Rate

09 January 2006

Monotreme – at 00:22

From this article - Human bird flu cases reach Turkish capital

“Doctors said the infected children, aged 5 and 2, came from Beypazari west of Ankara and had caught the virus after contact with dead wild birds. Their parents tested negative.”

Hopefully the children will survive, but the point I want to make here is that the parents were tested. If all members in a family involved in a cluster are tested, it should be possible to get an accurate estimate of the true case fatality rate, even without complete sampling of all cases that occur. My understanding is that testing family members of affected patients is standard procedure for WHO.

Monotreme – at 10:02

There have been several comments on various threads referring to the CFR.

Just a reminder, patients may survive for a month before dying. For example, the first person reported to contract H5N1 influenza in Thailand was a 6 year old boy from Suphanburi province. He first became ill on January 3 2004. H5N1 infection was confirmed. He died on February 3. A 6 year old boy from Kanchanaburi province first became ill on January 6 2004. He died on January 25 2004. From the Flu Wiki Thailand page?.

We won’t know for some time what the true case fatality rate in Turkey. In the meantime, the correct way to calculate an estimated CFR is to use the number dead as the numerator and the (number dead + the number recovered) as the denominator. A failure to do this during the SARs epidemic led to an artificially low CFR until the epidemic was over and the deaths “caught up” with the number of cases.

24 May 2006

DemFromCTat 10:32

closed for volume issues

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