For those who don’t remember, after being hit in the head by an acorn Chicken Little went from town to town telling everyone he met the sky is falling the sky is falling.
Finally, when a real disaster hit (the fox eating all his friends) it was too late no one believed him.
Throughout the media you can’t pick up a paper, turn on the radio and not hear story after story of the swine flu spreading throughout the country. While I was on an outing with some of my children this weekend, my wife took our youngest child to the doctor’s office because “she had a fever” concerned that she may have the flu (we have some friends she was with that last week came back from Mexico), the good news, it was a cold and disappeared shortly afterwards.
But we need to keep things in perspective, over the past few years we have seen scares about diseases such as SARS, Legionnaire’s Disease, Anthrax, West Nile Virus, and Ebola. All these problems are bad but none are pandemics.
Today, every disaster is a major one, the pattern is always the same, the politicians get scared, the media screams the sky is falling and common citizens run for cover. In 1976 we also were faced with Swine Flu, that time at Ft. Dix New Jersey, in the end congress voted to inoculate 40 million people, 20 died of the vaccine and only one died of the flu.
This weekend in the Wall Street Journal buried in a section on Pandemics is the commentary Why Swine Flu Isn’t So Scary by Pater Palese, Chairman of the Department of Microbiology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
His take is simple, though swine flu and all flu’s for that matter are serious problems and we should take this strain seriously. It is most likely that this is not a more serious strain than other seasonal strains of flu viruses, and lacks an important molecular signature (the protein PB1-F2), which was present in the 1918 virus and the bird flu virus’s which was the topic of a scare last year, Though we ended up not seeing human to human spread of the disease.
The CDC also seems to be backing down, and Mexico thinks the worst may be over.
Since the dawn of time, politicians and others use the media to blow up problems treating what may be a small problem as if this was the end of the world. Today we get this information in real time so things are exasperated.
More physicians, scientists and experts need to speak out, and bring this and other scares back to reality.
Eventually we will have an outbreak of something serious and by then the public may not listen as closely.
Perhaps the sky is not falling.