Don’t get me wrong, it’s a tragedy that there were a couple of deaths related to swine flu yesterday here in the UK, but does it really need frontpage treatment from practically every newspaper today?
It’s the flu. Unfortunately, some people die of it every year, whether they are healthy or already infirm. It happens, and there’s next to nothing we can do about it. Whether it’s H1N1 or another strain, the whole concept of an infection from flu is that our body takes a few days to react and contain the virus. In that time, it can spread.
The difference this time round is that it has a scary name: “swine flu”. That moniker should’ve been dropped much sooner than it was by the authorities, and it has stuck in the media. So we see yet more FUD on the subject, and the public as a whole are lead to believe that it’s more deadly than usual.
And it’s really not. Here in Britain, there have been 17 deaths linked to swine flu so far this year. But we’ve not seen any statistics to say whether this is a particularly large variation from the usual numbers for seasonal flu-related deaths, so can’t compare it to last year.
And the vast majority of these deaths have been people who are already ill or infirm because of some other medical affliction. Again, it is an unfortunate fact that the disease affects the infirm, elderly and very young proportionately more severely than the average healthy person.
But every swine flu-related death is magnified by the media, causing more people to worry about it and think that they have the disease, and that it is often fatal. It’s not fatal all that often. Hell, you should be more worried about driving a car than about dying from the flu.
Try as they might, doctors and scientists are fighting a losing battle against the media’s storm in a teacup. “We must remember that every year there are deaths from complications of seasonal flu”, said the chairman of the British Medical Association’s GPs board, yet this is ignored in favour of grieving parents asking why they weren’t given Tamiflu (that wonder drug) earlier, as if that would’ve solved everything.
And because of the borderline hysteria, we see graphs like the above. It doesn’t track infection rates, but visits to doctors with “flu-like symptoms”. I have to believe that people wouldn’t bother with the doctors without all of this media outrage. We’ve all had the flu before, and we know how to deal with it: a couple of days in bed/on the sofa, paracetamol and lots of fluids.
But with “swine flu” (I feel it should have its own dramatic music), things are different. There was an audible intake of breath in my office when someone said that the daughter of someone else they know had swine flu. If it didn’t have this name, it wouldn’t have even been raised in conversation!
For me, you have to blame the media for this kind of public response. They’ve blown it out of all proportion, and anyone would think that we’re in the middle of an ebola outbreak…
