The alarming thing about the so-called swine flu is the number of variant viruses it has produced. Here’s a list:
• Media hysteria: the media hysteria virus has gone global and appears to spread most efficiently through web hosts—like the urban legend virus, it takes advantage of our propensity to exaggerate the significance of things we fear;
• Religious hysteria: related to the stupid virus, this affliction remains relatively contained because its etiology has been identified;
• Western banality: related to the arrogant virus, it has a pathology similar to the media virus but with a different outcome, affecting the victim’s eyes by trivializing everything the victim sees.
Let’s take a closer look:
First, let me be absolutely clear. Notwithstanding the “urban legend” reference, swine flu is real. For details, see the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention web site.
Nevertheless, swine flu is also a media creation. A week ago we had warnings of a travel advisory in the news media which raised the “spectre of pandemic.” The WHO has raised the pandemic alert level to 4. The CBC reports that Mexicans in the town of La Gloria believe their town is ground zero and point to the factory farm operation, Granjas Carroll de Mexico, 50 per cent owned by Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, Inc. which owns eight farms in the area. Grist drew a connection between the flu outbreak and factory farming, a view which has some plausibility.
The lines are drawn. On the one side, political and economic interests seek to cast doubt on the factory farming explanation and are engaging in damage control. See, for example, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin who has been advocating for the Iowa Pork Producers Association. On the other side, environmental groups have been warning for years that factory farming is a health crisis waiting to happen. They’ve been dying for an opportunity to prove a relationship between giant open-air manure pits and the evolution of new bugs. The consequence of this polarization is a loss of objectivity. Because epidemiology expresses its findings in terms probability, regardless of medical findings, there is enough wiggle room for each side of the debate to throw doubt onto the other side. They’ll roll around with each other like pigs in shit irrespective of the facts.
Media hysteria
Media hysteria takes doubt—doubt about etiology and pathology—and spreads the fear that we all might get infected through contact with someone who has traveled to La Gloria. This is coupled with references to the epidemic of 1918 when tens of millions died. Facts are secondary. Media hysteria isn’t about facts; it’s about fear. Media sells papers, grabs views, increases traffic, by playing on our fundamental vulnerability (no one wants to die), but it does so without offering any (what should we call it?) pastoral support. It is information without meaning.
Religious hysteria
BBC reports that Israel’s Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the virus should be named the “Mexican flu” instead of “swine flu” because the name is offensive to Jews and Muslims. This is a remarkable claim. The simple use of the word, even in the context of a medical discussion, is enough to give offense? I thought this was the 21st century when people no longer believe that words themselves have magical properties. I will assume that this view is limited to Yakov Litzman. Clearly, the religious hysteria virus causes a pathological lowering of the threshold at which we take offense. Even more remarkable is that Litzman uses the occasion of offense to embrace his Muslim brothers. Say what? I seem to remember something going on in Israel just four months ago … But I have such a short memory.
Western banality
An American has died! That changes everything. Obama has pledged 1.8 bn to the fight against swine flu or Mexican flu or whatever you want to call it. And Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency in California so he can get his hands on some of that money—kind of a health care bailout, if you like. Meanwhile 1.7 million children under the age of five die of diarrhea each year, another 2 million from acute respiratory infections, and another 850,000 from malaria. See the CDC statistics here.
We fail to think globally. We value some lives more than others. But pathogens don’t respect borders. If we neglect others, ultimately we neglect ourselves too.
It is shameful that we can mobilize tremendous resources simply because an event has hit the news and spread in a way which, ironically, we describe as viral, yet most of the time we’d rather sit on our duffs and watch reality TV while thousands of infants die each night in places we’d be lucky to locate on a map.
Image credit: Thomas Splettstoesser (www.scistyle.com) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]