Pigs Might Flu

Well it seems swine flu is back on the agenda. Not that it ever really went away of course, but since it now seems the media dictates the seriousness of these things more than any medical professional, it's fair to say that when it's back on the front pages, it's time to panic.

So with news of the first UK death from the disease it is most definitely time to throw your hands up and start running around like a headless chicken. Oh my god, did someone mention a chicken! Was it coughing? Did it look ill? Tell me about the chicken!!! Don't worry, this is swine flu, we've forgotten about bird flu now. Rule of thumb is this; if you happen to be down old Macdonald's farm and something goes oink-oink-cough, oink-oink-cough, you'll do best to steer well clear.

A Radio 2 news discussion yesterday took calls from members of the public, many of whom expressed their fears and concerns in the wake of Britain's first swine flu fatality. While some offered their sympathies to the victim's family, others took a more objective - you might even say obtuse - stance on the situation.

One gentleman in particular took what might be described as the 'old school' approach to the latest swine flu news reports. His opinion was very much that we're all completely overreacting and that one death does not constitute the pandemic that we were warned about when swine flu first appeared. Of course, in his day they ate a bowl of botulism for breakfast and bathed bi-weekly in rat's urine to get the coal dust out of their hair. Never did him any harm.

In one respect, you've got to agree that the man has a point. Swine flu is not wiping us out in anything like the sort of numbers we might have initially feared. And even the media was getting a bit bored with it until that poor lady fell victim to a severe case. However, the man's argument was so lacking in actual facts that I had to cringe as his rant continued.

It’s true, we're not all dropping like dominoes as the Daily Mail said we would, but at the same time we can't just ignore it. Old school guy tried to argue that people die every year from ordinary flu, and that doesn't draw media attention. But what he completely failed to realise, despite efforts from the show’s presenter, is that swine flu is different. It is a new strain, to which no one has a natural immunity, precisely the reason the WHO is taking it so seriously, just as it did with bird flu.

But what this latest flu outbreak demonstrates more than anything is that people are generally terrible at choosing where to get their information, and armed with a little bit of it, they stumble haphazardly through a minefield of fiction to arrive at a fact. Putting trust in the media to correctly interpret and report on a complicated medical issue is probably our first big mistake, the one that opens the can of ham. The people that fill these column inches have no more idea what swine flu is than any other average Joe. They’re not doctors, they’re journalists, and they’re paid to report the problem not to treat it.

And therein lies the real threat that we face. We gather our ‘facts’ from people that don’t know what they’re talking about and pass them around like a virus, from mouth to mouth, tongue to swollen tongue. There has to be a certain twisted irony in the fact that our ignorance may be as malignant and dangerous as our mucus. As Orwell’s Napoleon might have said, all animals are viral, but some are more viral than others.