PANIC!

April 30th, 2009 – Great Scott! A new strand of porcine influenza has stricken at the demographic and economic heart of Latin America and is rapidly spreading across the globe. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has thus assigned a five out of six to this public health threat, creating widespread fear and panic amongst the media-hungry masses. The dangerous disease, fatal even, is now effectively a level shy of full on pandemic such as the medieval Black plague, 19th century Smallpox or 20th century Polio and AIDS.

Thusly, I encourage all my readers from Vancouver to Minsk and Johannesburg to Hanoi to raid their local Wal-Mart in search of canned food, bottled water, face masks, latex gloves, batteries a portable toilet and a few gallons of anti-bacterial soap. Setting up a fortress of hygiene in your basement/nuclear fallout shelter/local underground parking for the next two years should be simple enough. I will establish why I am so sure that the pandemic of global proportions will subside in two years but first, let us take a look at our epic killer as portrayed by the media.

“Global pandemic”, “No one is safe”, “No cure or Vaccine”, “Run for the hills”, “Revenge of the Pork”, “Al Gore says I told you so” and “Worst than SARS, bird flu and West Nile virus combined” have been the headlines flooding our television sets and newsstands this week and I got some more news for you: it’s far from being over. If you remember what a fuss North America makes every year about West-Nile virus, you wouldn’t suspect that the mild disease only kills a handful of frail and/or elderly people every year. As for Bird Flu, we heard about it for years even though less than a thousand people died from it in South-East Asia and less than 50 in the Americas. I do not wish to belittle the death of 1000 South-East Asians, I am just putting into perspective that the media do not even remember the tsunami of 2004 that killed hundreds of thousands of the same people. To be blunt, a disease is more sexy because it is invisible and can potentially be everywhere at any time; it is fear. To be blunter, that disease is a million times sexier if it affects people with white skin. To prove a point and to inform those of you that don’t know, there still is no cure for AIDS. There are antiretrovirals available to us in the industrialised world that have greatly diminished the number of victims but millions are infected and dying in Africa = old and boring news.

Pig Vs. Human

Let us take a look at this disease; it is only prudent seeing as CNN won’t stop pestering me about proper hygiene when coughing and even the newspaper I work for has a daily update about where the disease has struck and when it will potentially get to a location near me, resulting in a painful and messy death. Porcine influenza or “Swine flu” boasts a misleading title associating it with pigs. It could simply be called the flu since it biologically and chemically IS the flu. The difference here, as with the old bird flu, is that they represent a distinct strand of the virus that mainly affects the animal they are named for. In very rare cases, the disease can be passed on to humans and even more rarely, it can be transmitted between humans. For the current “pandemic” of swine flu, there has been a minor mutation that allows its free transmission between humans, spreading as the regular flu does. This is the important point: the symptoms are mostly the same. Runny nose, congested sinuses, coughing, feeling weak, headaches, a slower immune system and a small chance of it progressing to pneumonia, sinusitis and other manageable infections will occur when you have the flu, human or otherwise. The second important point, if you really think about it, is that I am probably the first one to tell you what the symptoms of swine flu are. You see if the BBC News Service comes out and tells you that a lot of people are getting the flu in Mexico, there is no real story there. If they use words like “pandemic”, conceal the true risks of the disease, polish it up as a shiny new dangerous ailment and then tell you it is inching it’s way closer to your home, sneeze-by-sneeze they have found the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

That being said, porcine, avian and the good-old regular flu are no laughing matters. Thousands upon thousands of people die every year from their complications, mostly young infants, the elderly and immunocompromised people. It could even be called a pandemic but instead we accept this disease as an inevitable occurrence that strengthens our immune system and then we go on with our lives. I cannot accuse the media of doing their jobs excessively; I accuse them of hiding certain facts to focus on the more sensational aspects of their selling point (just like the make millions quick infomercials that spend 30 minutes telling you how much money each of these pretty people won with the advertised “method” or “system” but never tell you how). They will get some shiny awards in journalism and the rest of the world will panic unduly for something that is, for all intents and purposes, banal.

Now, to conclude with a historical link and to leave you feeling confused and ambiguous about this article, I present you with one of the deadliest pandemics of human history.

The great influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 was shadowed and intensified simultaneously by a period of great war in Europe although it was truly global. From inner Siberia to the South Pacific, the disease was similar to the common cold yet added a very strong propensity towards pneumonia and death. Over 50 million died worldwide although upwards of 25% of the world population was infected. Modern medicine was still no match for the disease and all responses rather revolved around spraying things, quarantines and campaigns against public spitting (things that could still work and that may be proposed soon across the world). Its origin is probably American yet the Americans blamed the Spanish…for kicks. This is why today; we may hear this disease and this episode referred to as “the Spanish Flu”. Its biology, its method of spreading and its incredible virulence remains unknown; what we do know is that it was porcine influenza, a simple mutation of swine flu.

(Pictured: Doctors sent to "help" victims of the medieval plague wore long-nosed masks containing fresh herbs; it was thought that smells carried diseases - A theory about how swine flu spreads to humans)

End.