Overreacting to the outbreak of a new disease can, to a certain extent, be somewhat predicted. Then again, so can the news cycle of the story. At this point, we’ve had the initial panic, the over-reaching dooms-day forcasts and now we are moving to the realisation that it won’t really be that bad and that it is being quite well contained. The abrupt about-turn of various media sources will be done with their normal fluid penchant for “reporting the news”. See here for today’s headlines in the UK papers. Unfortunately they went to press before the American media started to pick up on the fact that swine flu isn’t actually as petrifying and deadly as it seemed at first (see here for a CNN headline)

As reported in that CNN story, approximately 36000 people die every year from seasonal influenza in the United States. So far this year there have been 13000 deaths. And swine has yet to kill a single person there. So why the panic?

I think it has something to do with who we expect to die. I’ve either read a book or watched a documentary that was talking about the difference between people’s reactions to the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who die annually throughout the world compared for example with the 3,000 odd people who died in the 9/11. We’ve no problem with the soldiers dying, because they are expected to do so, but a normal day-to-day average Joe dies and they’re appalled and terrified. Here, we expect old people to die from the flu and from life in general, so when we hear that 13,000 people have died from flu this year we think “Well, they were old, it was their time”. Compare this to swine flu deaths, which appears to have a huge effect on young people. While roughly a hundred and fifty deaths are attributed to flu like symptoms in Mexico (and only seven confirmed deaths from swine flu at time of writing) when you take the young profile of victims and combine it with the rec ency of knowledge of the disease it can trigger mass outrage and panic. Young people are dying from a flu virus? That’s not supposed to happen!

So people overreact. I’m not saying that we should ignore any advised being given by the WHO and government organisations. Be safe. Just… Don’t Panic.

 

In other news, my friend Adrian (of Aide in France fame) has started a new blog for when he gets back to England after Erasmus. He intends it to be his opinion on the media in the UK, heaping praise on the righteous and condemning the hyperbolic wicked. I might have made that last bit up. Have a look at his blog, here’s one of his posts. It’s called the Daily Fail by the way. Nice name, that.