Thoughts on influenza A(H1N1) (swine flu)

I’m as opposed to media hysteria as the next halfway rational person. Members of the media have a job to do, and that job is to make money for their network/media corporations. Picking up an exciting little piece of news and turning it into a media blitz is good for business. And it’s partway sport and partway art to make fun of this phenomenon. We all do it. I myself have laughed at and sent along all the swine flu jokes, quips, and quotes.

To wit:

I forwarded Junior Minister Sion Simon’s quote: “I’m not saying Susan Boyle caused swine flu. I’m just saying that nobody had swine flu, she sang on TV, people got swine flu.”

I linked to the Visual History of Flu Pandemics, a graphic clearly showing how insignificant the swine flu is compared to pandemic influenza strains throughout history.

I circulated this 1976 Swine Flu Propaganda ad:

On Twitter I linked to a quote on a blog that I read on another blog, which was subsequently picked up by my Twitter followers and circulated around the Twitterverse for a day or so: “90 people get the swine flu and everybody wants to wear a mask. A million people have AIDS and no one wants to wear a condom.”

And there’s more, but I’ll spare you.

Yeah, it’s funny. Because 36,000 people in the U.S. die from the “regular flu” every year! And most of them are little children and the infirm elderly, not us, the normal, media-consuming demographic. Besides, all the mortality is mainly confined to Mexico. We can live without our vacation south of the border this year. So we’re safe, and taking all these ridiculous precautions is just plain silly. Silly, silly, I say! I mock your face mask.

But seriously now, a 22 month old child has died, right here in the United States. (I don’t want to hear that the child was from Mexico. It’s irrelevant.) Just because we already have and seem to accept a constantly mutating strain of influenza virus that kills 36,000 individuals each year doesn’t mean that we need another, whether it kills one, 100, or 10,000. Killers do pop up. Our regular influenza isn’t pandemic, but it’s an organized killer. HIV is another one: we’re lucky that HIV is transmitted only sexually. Sure, the media hysteria surrounding swine flu has been entertaining, just like the shark attack hysteria that pops up every once in a while. But H1N1 is a pretty new pathogen and it does deserve a little attention before we dismiss it as a mere disorganized, unprofessional killer.