The real peril of H1N1

As a 10-second sound bite, swine flu is a lot sexier than our own fallibility

David Macri

“Fear makes the wolf
bigger than he is.”

– German Proverb

Well, it had to happen eventually. Despite all of the gaudy comparisons to the Great Depression, the news story candle that is the ‘global recession’ had to burn itself out of fashion sooner or later.

No matter how infused with drama, outrage and terrifying historical precedents any good news story may be, the great bullhorn of sporadically important information we call the mainstream media always reaches the point where it hauls in the reigns and points itself towards a new obsession. After all, the attention span of the media is a fickle beast.

And so we find ourselves bombarded with reports from around the world of a new reason to live in fear – the dreaded ‘swine flu’ - which like the global recession, is being compared ad nauseum with a truly devastating historical occurrence.

This time around, the analogies are senselessly being drawn to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, which depending on your source, was responsible for the deaths of anywhere between 20 to 100 million people worldwide. The H1N1 virus on the other hand, has so far infected just over 2,000 people in 24 countries, according to reports released by the World Health Organization on May 6.

No matter how many frightened dullards there may be in North America, any person with some mathematical literacy (some being the key word) should be able to grasp the notably more-than-slight disparity evident in comparisons between these two flu outbreaks in terms of real numbers.

Predictably though, despite the rather obvious numerical strike against H1N1 as a second coming of the worst pandemic in recorded history, mass media outlets have been peppering their bloated streams of swine flu reporting with such delusions of grandeur. Fear, as the old German proverb insinuates, has a habit of doing just that. And if there is one thing the mass media can be accused of peddling, it is most certainly the exacerbation of human fear.

While the optimist in me considers this new apple of the media’s eye to be at the very least a sign that numbers incomprehensible to most without the possession of a degree in business or finance will not tire my eyes and brain every morning at breakfast, the fact that ‘swine flu’ should not be the news story to overtake the ‘great recession’ cannot be overstated. In keeping with numbers for a moment, the good old-fashioned common influenza virus alone is responsible for anywhere between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths annually in the world. The H1N1 death count, again, pales in comparison.

The real cause for alarm about the ‘swine flu’ outbreak is that it has taken relatively little in the way of actual harm to human beings to rouse us into panic. If humans are going to come into contact with each other, we had better understand that there is a possibility we might become sick as a result. Yes, it is saddening that people are dying, but it is the fact that we think we are invincible that is the real news story. The problem is that it may take more than a 10 second sound bite to tell it.

Published in Volume 63, Number 27 of The Uniter (May 20, 2009)

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