Swine Flu

‘Jon I’m sending you some healthy products which are supposed to build up your immune system affectively. It’s just what with this Swine Flu going round I’m worried about you and need to know you’re as healthy as possible.’ Bless my mum always looking out for me. And as sweet and generous and caring that gesture was from my lovely mother I couldn’t help but feel a little sad that she’d been swept into the swine flu panic.

Now don’t get me wrong I am absolutely not denying that swine flu could turn into something potentially nasty. And I’m not sniffing at the fact that people have lost friends and family to the illness. But the Black Death it ain’t. So why does our media seem determined to make it seem like it’s an unstoppable plague that is going to kill you and everyone around you?

Firstly this is all a little too familiar. Remember the dreaded SARS pandemic. The illness was essentially just a slightly more contagious strong cold, but the world’s media went nuts. I remember one particularly harrowing story about a man in Canada who missed his daughter’s wedding because he was quarantined in his house. The news made it out in the report that he was on deaths door and that he was scared he’d never see his daughter again. Being slightly younger (surprisingly) and more naive then I am now that scared me until I thought about it logically. Surely if he was on his way to meet his maker they would postpone the wedding, or at the very least the honeymoon, and make sure he was alright. It was one of the first times I started to really question what we were being told about the world in the media. In the aftermath of the dreadful SARS pandemic a statistic revealed that in the period that SARS was at large more people died from falling down the stairs.

Around 30,000 people die from regular flu in the USA a year (although obviously this can be a factor and not always the direct cause). Most of these people have poor immune systems and their bodies just can’t handle it. It’s a nasty illness as I’m sure everyone who reads this is aware. But deaths of this kind aren’t published on the front page of newspapers or at the top of news bulletins. Since Swine Flu emerged around a month ago two people have died from it in the USA, one of them being a 26 month old baby. Of course that’s tragic but clearly a baby’s immune system isn’t fully formed and any particularly nasty common illness could potentially kill a baby. What is the Medias obsession, as well, with leading a story with a death count? When swine flu first emerged on pretty much every front page they said something along the lines of ‘512 People Die Of Swine Flu In Mexico’ it wasn’t until you got about half way through the article that they said 26 people were confirmed of dyeing from the illness. So basically the front page was a lie and it ropes people into panic like my mum did. In fact the figure of confirmed deaths is at 48 in Mexico. The Sun couldn’t even be bothered to call it swine flu just in case the readers didn’t get the swine reference. They just called it pig flu. Idiots!

The Media does this far too often. I remember a couple of days after Hurricane Katrina hit some idiot from FEMA (who were partly responsible for the loss of life anyway) told reporters that they feared that over 100,000 people had died. The print media went crazy and ran the figures. Obviously at that point people around the world could not know that this was completely false. In fact it was a suspected 1,836 people who died. This is a horrendously tragic number of people but imagine the people around the USA who had family or friends in New Orleans and they here 100,000 people have died. They must have given up hope.

The way I see it with the economic downturn seemingly bottoming out and now slowly climbing again the papers became bored with the story. Not enough gloom. After a few feeble attempts to get it going again they jumped on the first disaster story they could. Scaring half the world to death into the point where some began panic buying tinned goods to batten down the hatches and hide till it’s over like it was some sort of zombie invasion. Meanwhile hundreds of people are dying in the civil war in Sri Lanka, the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe is not under control and soldiers and civilians are still being killed every day in Afghanistan and Iraq. Let alone the ongoing famine in Africa. I’m not preaching I’m just trying to point out that there really are more pressing issues then swine flu.

The pandemic is now taking a back seat to the ridiculous MP expenses story which seems to be getting more and more ridiculous as it develops. So suddenly we’re not all going to die which is nice but look at those greedy bloody MP’s eh? It’s a ridiculous state of affairs when the media can be so fickle with stories which are supposedly going to affect everyone. Do they just think that British people are so self centred that we won’t care about story unless it directly affects our lifestyle? Because it’s not true.

So thank you Mum for the immune builder type things. But I’m not going to change my behaviour and my lifestyle because of swine flu. And neither should anyone else.