It's crazy that we get so worked up about these things.
Remember bird flu that was going to destroy civilisation as we know it? I think the toll was similar but in Asia.
Then there was the killer virus Ebola which was so scary- but it killed about 1000 people- all of them in Africa.
Then there was the other things we get worked up about- Y2K, climate change etc. etc.
But what about the millions that do die from malaria, malnutrition, cholera and other terrible diseases? We don't worry about them, or invest a fraction of what we are wasting on "climate change prevention." Interesting set of standards we have.
Anyway here is an article from today's SMH that add a bit of perspective to the swine flu issue
'It's safer kissing a pig than your partner'
EVEN after the World Health Organisation assured the world it is safe to eat pork, pig farmer Ean Pollard is prepared to go a little further.
"It is being passed on from human to human. You'd be safer kissing a pig than your partner," he said, adding with a chuckle: "I went out and pashed a few of the pigs this morning."
If there is a tinge of desperation in his dry humour it is borne of three hard years for the industry, in which the number of breeding sows has shrunk by about 20 per cent because of the high dollar and high grain prices.
But Mr Pollard is fastidious about cleanliness. It begins each day at 7am, when his 12 staff arrive for work. They scrub down and change into clean clothes. "About the only thing that stays with them is their underwear, so I supply them with socks, boots, shorts, overalls, T-shirts, wet-weather gear," Mr Pollard said.
Read the full article here
I guess it's because horrifying news sells better than truth. What a society we live in!
ReplyDeleteWe had one government official telling people to stockpile up to two weeks of food in case they get quarantined and can't go and get their own-- don't people have friends? She was quickly corrected.Really, can't they just wait to get the real facts and then tell us what to do? Now they seem to be saying it's not so bad... so why panic in the first place?
ReplyDeleteArthur keeps telling me that you can tell when a politician is lying - their lips are moving.
ReplyDeletePanic doesn't help any time, though the media seem to enjoy building it.The downside is people later resent it and assume nothing really happened. Regarding Y2k, there were things that were going to break, and things that weren't. A lot of organisations invested the required effort to avoid major issues, and if they hadn't, would have been deeply in trouble, but you don't see the successes, you see the failures. Bird flu may have been the same, and pig flu containment efforts may well be justified; it makes sense to limit its spread while finding out.I agree on climate change vs malaria, cholera, starvation etc. Also on military spending vs clean water and food distribution.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that instead of giving us a realistic assessment the authorities, this time it's WHO and the US health officials, blow everything up "just in case".As it turns out the official death toll in Mexico is just 20 at the moment, but people in leadership were making comparisons with the 1918 pandemic which killed millions.Taking measures to control a potential pandemic is very different to making out that this could be "The Big One"I think in fact that it is unlikely that we will ever see a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 pandemic- not in terms of deaths anyway. It is possible that a flu virus could mutate to be very virulent, but social conditions are very different to what they were 100 years ago.We are much wealthier for a start and have better access to good nutrition and healthier services. Vaccines and other treatments have improved also, particularly over the last 20 years. We now have anti-viral drugs.The pandemic of 1918 came on the tail-end of the First World War when economies were devastated by the war, infrastructure was knocked out and the general health of whole populations was reduced by factors such as war injuries, years of stress, food rationing.I don't think that bird flu and pig flu are success stories of disease containnment at all. It seems to me that they were/are just normal strains of influenza of pretty average impact on people of average health blown up into a mega fear campaign that is totally unnecessary.In Sydney on the weekend we saw people wearing facemasks, even though the number of confirmed cases in the country is pretty close to zero. I think that is just a total over-reaction.Y2K was a problem that again was hyped beyond its potential. Yes, there were problems that needed to be addressed, but I think the combination of media that needs to sell advertising and government that needs to be seen to be doing something to prevent disasters (real and imagined) made things seem potentially worse than reality.I think it was Y2K that really made me realise that the British attitude of "muddling through" is the best policy. Ignore the media hype and the politicians blustering and wait and see what really happens. The average life span of a media/government scare is about two weeks.
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