A Reasonable Response to Swine Flu

In this season of divisive, rancorous debate over politics, with media sources entrenched on the right and the left, there's one thing you will see them in agreement on: Hyped up fear mongering of the H1N1 swine flu outbreak. My two youngest kids came down with swine flu the first week of school this fall, initially scaring the heck out their mom and I. About ten days, a couple of doctor visits, a few boxes of Kleenex, a gallon or two of hand sanitizer and some Tamiflu later, we came away a little wiser about the nature of this new flu. Sure, they got high fevers - both around 102, 103 for a few hours - and yes, they developed bad coughs, had sore throats, but you know what? It looked and acted a whole lot like any flu I've ever seen.

During the course of this, I did a lot of research on H1N1 and was surprised to see how trumped up much of the coverage about this "pandemic" was. Here are some widely reported assumptions:

1) It is disproportionately striking down the young and healthy. "Regular" flu is supposed to attack only the old, very young, and those with underlying health problems. The statement is essentially true, but it's what is not being said that tells the real story. The CDC itself is assuming that the reason older people may not be getting H1N1 is that that have been exposed to a similar strain at some time in the past. So, the real statement should not be "it's striking down young people", but "it's not striking older people". Same result, very different fear factor.

2) Swine flu is deadlier than the regular flu: The current death rate of H1N1 cases is about 1%, lower than that of the regular seasonal flu. This is a rate currently lower than the regular seasonal flu. But the significant fact here is not that it's any more virulent. It's just new. Few people have any immune defense against it.

3) Face masks work: Viruses are so small it has only been with relatively recent microscope technology that they have even been able to image them.They are thousands of times smaller than bacteria. Trying to stop a virus with a store bought "dust" mask (the disposable paper sort) is like trying to catch water with a tennis racket.

An old Poli Sci prof of mine said something once that I have never forgotten: "Media does not exist to inform you. It exists to sell advertising". And this is just as true of Fox as it is MSNBC. Whatever your politics may be, if you're concerned about swine flu, take some time to go through the CDC site's pages: Centers for Disease Control.

Later,

Jim