The state of world health is far from adequate. 9 million children die every year due to a lack of medical treatment. AIDS is ravaging sub-Sahara Africa and Central Asia, and the HIV infections rate shows little signs of slowing down. More than 500,000 women die of complications during child birth every year. Millions in the developing world go without clean water and adequate nutrition.
So why is everyone freaking out over the mild H1N1 (a.k.a. swine flu)?
Compared to pneumonia and the common cold, swine flu has an extremely low death rate, even among some of the most vulnerable: my own age group.
I will admit that there is some reason behind this paranoia over swine flu. H1N1 just recently acquired the genetic code that enables it to jump from human to human. It spread from Mexico and the United States in March 2009 to practically every country in the world within a matter of months. With these facts in mind, one can easily draw parallels between H1N1 and the 1918 influenza epidemic, an epidemic that hit every nation of the world and had (partially) originated in the North American continent. But need I forget to mention that H1N1 has not wreaked nearly as much havoc as the seasonal flu? As many as 36,000 people in the United States die of the seasonal flu every year. And yet somehow we have never lost our sanity over our fear of the flu.
I’m not saying that we should completely disregard H1N1 and throw all common sense about health to the wind. We should do our best to keep healthy, like covering our coughs with our elbows and washing our hands frequently. Children in particular must keep healthy, in light of a small spike in swine flu deaths recently and their constant interactions with many other children in the course of one school day. Overall, we should be cautious and keep ourselves aware of the flu, because only time will tell if swine flu will either die out or become the much feared super pandemic that kills millions (though current research predicts that swine flu is following the path of the former).
But why has swine flu captivated the obsession of my generation? Perhaps my generation’s extreme fear over swine flu has been fueled in part by overly dramatic media reports. Never before has the world been so connected and peaceful; a car bombing in Pakistan will make homepage news on the Times website within a matter of minutes. I’m not sure we could have said that even 20 years ago, when the globally connected internet was still an obscure invention, and the Cold War, which had indirectly spawned two deadly wars, was still brewing. With this in mind, perhaps we can understand how word of five deaths to a new disease in one remote town can spread across the internet and receive a spot on a countless number of news company homepages by day’s end. And thus, a relatively obscure and, for the most part, non-threatening disease can create mass hysteria among my peers, who look at the homepages of dozens of news companies over the course of one day. With this information overload of swine flu comes the extreme panic over this disease.
For more information, please see:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8083179.stm
http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Resources/Static/Products/Progress2009/MDG_Report_2009_En.pdf
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/23626/
http://www.star-telegram.com/health/story/1675099.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8159488.stm
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/28/regular.flu/index.html
http://doihaveswineflu.org/
Photo Courtesy of http://filipspagnoli.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/infant-mortality.gif
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