It comes back

Should we be happy/relieved/cautious over the latest swine flu figures that show only 30,000 new cases were reported last week (compared with 110,000 the previous week). I keep hearing the catchphrase from BBC4's docudrama, The Forgotten Fallen, in my head: "It comes back". Which is of course what Sir Liam Donaldson and others keep saying.

But I still have concerns over the figures being banded about. Leaving aside for a moment the questions of how that '30,000' is calculated, the BBC news story suddenly said: "The total of swine flu-related deaths in England and Scotland stands at 40". Er, just a minute - only yesterday it was 31 dead - so we've had a 30 per cent rise in the number of deaths?!

Still, may hay while the sunshines and if you want to know what's likely to happen in Europe over the winter, just see what's happening in the southern hemisphere at the moment. Argentina is a sobering place to start.