Flu Fear

This is an excellent point you make here. It is very easy to give/receive miscommunication or out-of-context info, particularly when some big issue is raging on. Our minds are quick to assume. Still, the swine flu (albeit, not the bird flu) is here, and does deserve the appropriate amount of attention. It is certainly getting quite a bit of information, but is it the right kind? We need to prepare health-wise, economy-wise and safety-wise; but has the media taken the issue overboard? It’s an interesting thought. I would say that, personally, the potential for a giant pig pandemic is certainly there and that the American economy is already suffering quite a bit because of this situation. And, of course, there are many people who have been hurt or died as a result of this–primarily in Mexico, where it originated, for the time-being. So, yes, it does matter. I watched an interesting video on this earlier today at newsy.com. It’s worth looking at:
http://www.newsy.com/videos/the_world_on_swine_flu_alert/

re-reading naomi klein’s _shock doctrine_ and as a result, the deployment of images like this stands out even more clearly as a cheap trick designed to scare. i wonder what percentage of viewers looked at the caption/date like you did.
nice catch, bag…

speaking to the fine (or invisible) line between fact vs. assumption & their relationship to worry, hysteria and outright fear, check out this article (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/27/MN0O17A8Q5.DTL&tsp=1) about new swine flu counts in California. The headline is ‘Sacramento has 2 more swine flu cases, California’s count rises to 13′ while, in the article, the two newbies are explained in the following way:
‘Health officials said the two newest swine flu cases in Sacramento County tested positive for Influenza Type A, but they could not be sub-typed to see if they were indeed the swine flu strain. Nonetheless, the county health officials said they were directed, apparently by the state, to conclude that the cases were indeed swine flu.’
in other words, 2 kids have the flu (not totally impossible outside this scenario), and state pressures medics to say its swine flu. though this is not visual, it is linked to visuals like this: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&t=p&msa=0&msid=106484775090296685271.0004681a37b713f6b5950&source=embed&ll=36.173357,-98.085937&spn=35.199586,56.689453&z=4
collectively, the media(+) is creating a state of panic (did you know we’re in Stage 4, a pandemic alert, according to the WHO? if that doesn’t tell you to worry, what does?). This panic, to anyone who has lived in a third world country (where, when sickness hits, has more immediate & significant morbid effects due to a confluence of long term malnourishment and lack of access to proper medical care, among other factors) doesn’t quite resonate as what one might conceive of as a ‘pandemic’. the media is also, effectively i think, encouraging more flu shots, which are made by for-profit pharmaceutical companies & aren’t even directly tested on this particular strain..

Maybe the media is scare mongering, but frankly it doesn’t bother me. I think we ought to be scared, if that’s what it takes to adequately prepare us for pandemics. Read Mike Davis’s article in the Guardian about swine flue and industrial pig farming in the U.S.
A public health expert also said on Charlie Rose last night that a pandemic, which we tend to think of as a rare thing, actually points to the need for serious healthcare reform precisely because uninsured people are the least likely to go to a doctor when they have a fever which could be serious; but they should go to a doctor because swine flu needs to be treated within the first 48 hours, and Tamiflu is only by prescription in the U.S.
Let’s not flog the “flu shots are made by for-profit pharma companies” therefore they’re evil. Surely a for-profit flu shot in this case is by far a lesser evil than nothing at all. They said on Charlie Rose that the 2008 flu shot did have some overlap with this particular virus.

First time commenter, lurker for about a year. I’d just like to point out that the systems in place to respond to emerging flu outbreaks or pandemics are the same regardless of whether the strain is “avian” or “swine”. So these people drilling in Indonesia would be the same responders to the current strain if it develops into a pandemic and Indonesia is affected.