H1N1 Flu outbreak
Simon Jenkins
AT LAST, an expert has spoken. "It's just like a cold says girl, 12," according to the front page of the Daily Mail. The paper had tracked down a flu victim who was suffering from the "killer virus" that has apparently brought imminent death to each school in Britain, 94,000 Londoners, every pig in Egypt and, if an hysterical virologist is to be believed: "The whole of humanity".
As reporters gathered around the London deathbed of Sophie de Salis, she whispered, "I had a cough and was under the weather… but really it was just like a normal cold." After a day off from school she was feeling better. The reporters raced for the phones. Sophie's sniffle echoed around the world.
The 12-year-old was defying the World Health Organization. She was mocking Britain's Health Minister Alan Johnson, and his minions cowering in their bunker. She was jeopardising thousands of virologists who depend on regular pandemic scares for government grants.
To the global coalition of scientists, doom-merchants and drugs profiteers, what Sophie needed was a gag not a mask. The script had called for her to die.
This has been a desperate week even in the sick history of professional terrorism. On all the available facts, this year's mutation of the H1N1 flu was not serious. The confirmed death rate in Mexico appears to be a dozen people, roughly in line with the normal death rate from the flu there. The disease kills some 12,000 people a year worldwide.
The mutation did have worrying features, such as the susceptibility of younger people, but its incidence remained small. As for returning visitors, the occurrence — let alone mortality — is miniscule compared with say, victims of food poisoning. Nothing justified the pandemonium with which the British authorities and media greeted news of the illness last week.
Professional interests, domestic and international, and a compliant media turn an epidemic that regularly afflicts most countries into an opportunity for money and attention-grabbing.
Medical bureaucrats are like sharks. They must keep moving in their sea of bad news or starve. The customary patter has been a lurid declaration of an unquantified "risk" followed by the assertion of "better safe than sorry".
-----Sophie de Salis attended Alleyn's School in Dulwich, London. The school has had to close its doors due to the outbreak of the H1N1 flu. EPA
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Doses of Tamiflu now being consumed by healthy people could, so a doctor tells me, produce flu-like side effects that serve to vindicate the panic. In the ultimate absurdity, doses across America are said to be unobtainable since the government has ordered that they be stockpiled by hospitals against a possible pandemic. It is the perfect-storm scenario, a pandemic that becomes untreatable by generating its own panic.
No medical authority or media organisation has confined its reporting to the facts. Instead, the most alarmist of a range of possibilities is seized and exploited.
To the abuses of statistical science and its stooge, epidemiology, is added something far more dangerous, the abuse of the English language. Colds become "flulike". Sickness becomes "deadly". Potential becomes "imminent". Could becomes "will". An expected threat morphs into a real threat and then into a terror.
As a result, schools are being closed. Tour companies are going bankrupt. Every home in Britain is being leafleted with silly common-sense advice. Millions of pounds are spent on Tamiflu, funds presumably diverted from such medical priorities as vaccines against the real — and truly "lethal" — flu that visits Britain each winter.
Speculative scaremongering is not confined to medicine. It is meat and drink to the booming empires of counterterrorism and "health and safety". All rely on an upward trajectory of fear and risk aversion. All have thousands of jobs — and financial interests — at their beck and call, demanding millions in public spending.
Crying wolf over globalised disease is now so much a part of the medical/industrial complex that no sane person can tell what is real from what is log-rolling.
Exaggerating risk leads to mistakes, expense and a lowering of guards.
All professional activity is an exercise in true risk assessment. We want to know if a particular course of action will leave us richer, safer and alive. We are at the mercy of panic. That is how the credit crunch came to pass.
To this pandemic there is no known antidote. THE GUARDIAN
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From TODAY, News – Thursday, 07-May-2009
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