The “news-to-death ratio” is a concept introduced by Hans Rosling during the early days of the 2009 swine flu “pandemic.”
The ratio highlights the disproportionate media coverage of certain diseases, such as swine flu, while others barely get a mention, such as tuberculosis (“TB”).
For example, in the first 13 days of the 2009 swine flu “pandemic,” Rosling calculated that there were 8,176 news stories for every swine flu death compared to 0.1 news stories for every TB death.
Fast forward to today and, as far as the news-to-death ratio is concerned, nothing has changed.
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The News-to-Death Ratio Strikes Again
By Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, as published by the Brownstone Institute on 20 May 2026 (originally published 6 May 2026)
There is a peculiar arithmetic that governs modern health reporting, one that has very little to do with actual risk. Hans Rosling captured it neatly during the 2009 swine flu episode, when he calculated a “news-to-death ratio” of 8,176-to-1. In other words, for every death attributed to swine flu, there were over eight thousand news stories. Tuberculosis, by contrast, received less than 0.1 news stories per death over the same period.
If that sounds absurd, it is, and yet very little has changed.
Take the current hantavirus scare. A cruise ship, the MV Hondius, sits off Cape Verde. There are 7 cases in total (2 confirmed, 5 suspected) and 3 deaths, including a Dutch couple and a German national. Passengers have been confined to their cabins while evacuations and disinfection efforts are organised. It is, undeniably, a dramatic story: a floating Petri dish, a whiff of quarantine and a hint of the exotic.
In the past week alone, there have been at least 10 to 15 unique news stories, generating hundreds of articles. For a disease that, in normal times, struggles to attract even a single weekly mention, this represents a surge bordering on the hysterical.
And yet it is worth stepping back for a moment and asking, what are we actually looking at?
Hantavirus is a rare disease. In the United States, which diligently tracks such cases, there have been 890 laboratory-confirmed instances since 1993. In the UK, the situation is even less clear: from 2012 to early 2025, only 11 domestically acquired symptomatic cases have been recorded. Surprisingly, nine of these cases were not linked to cruise ships or exotic travel, but rather to a more mundane source – exposure to “pet fancy rats” or rodents bred as reptile feed.
This is not a pathogen ready to spread through the Home Counties. However, the rarity is not the issue; visibility is.
Diseases that afflict the poor, quietly and persistently, rarely command attention. Tuberculosis killed 1.23 million people globally in 2024. Over a million deaths every year, largely concentrated in less affluent parts of the world. It is one of the most lethal infectious diseases known to medicine, and yet it barely registers in the Western news cycle.
Why? Because TB is familiar, it is slow; It lacks narrative flair, and it does not trap well-heeled passengers in their cabins while helicopters circle overhead.
If you want coverage, you need something else entirely. You need novelty, uncertainty and, above all, proximity to affluence. A cruise ship outbreak ticks every box: a disease with a balcony suite.
This is the uncomfortable truth behind Rosling’s ratio: the media does not report risk, it reports drama. And drama requires context that audiences can imagine themselves in.
A rodent-borne virus in some remote rural setting barely registers. Put that very same virus aboard a cruise ship with buffet queues, balcony cabins and a passenger list that looks uncomfortably like the readership, and suddenly it becomes headline news.
The result is a profound distortion of public perception. We are invited to worry about the improbable while ignoring the inevitable and reality. A handful of hantavirus cases generates dozens of headlines; a million tuberculosis deaths pass with barely a murmur.
If we were to apply Rosling’s lens to the present moment, the imbalance would be obvious. Three deaths linked to a suspected hantavirus cluster have produced hundreds of reports in a matter of days. Meanwhile, tuberculosis continues its relentless toll with scarcely a fraction of that attention. The modern “news-to-death ratio” may not be precisely 8,176-to-1, but the underlying pattern remains intact.
The lesson here isn’t truly about hantavirus; instead, it’s about how we collectively determine what is significant.
Diseases associated with poverty – those that are endemic, predictable and devastating – often fail to attract media attention because they don’t instil fear in the right audience or in the right way. No one is interested in the thousands of cholera deaths that are too remote, too ordinary and lack the dramatic impact that draws interest. What commands attention are diseases that puncture our sense of safety, the kind that can slip past the gangway and make themselves at home on a cruise ship.
This post was written by two old geezers who live in a world where risk is misread, priorities are skewed, and the arithmetic of attention bears little resemblance to the arithmetic of death.
[Related:
- Video: Channel 4 News exposing the 2009 swine flu scam
- Is A “Pandemic Plan” Exposed in Kansas During 2009 Coming to Fruition in The UK Now?
- Professor Lockdown Ferguson returns. This time to “predict” the spread of bird flu in US cattle]
About the Authors
Carl Heneghan is a professor of Evidence-based Medicine at the University of Oxford, Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (“CEBM”) and an NHS Urgent Care general practitioner who regularly appears in the media. Tom Jefferson is a clinical epidemiologist and a Senior Associate Tutor at the University of Oxford. Together, they publish articles on a Substack page titled ‘Trust the Evidence’ (“TTE”).
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