Mal Fletcher comments

Mal Fletcher

The outbreak of swine flu in a number of nations worldwide is rightly a cause for concern. But it is not yet a cause for wide-spread anxiety.

The threat is real. Yet this situation is already showing signs of morphing into yet another example of the science and politics of fear.

Whatever we do to take action against swine flu, we must also guard against the panic or malaise that sustained fear brings.

Cases of infection have surfaced in countries as far apart as New Zealand, China and Israel. Around the world, governments and health authorities are trying to curtail the spread of the disease, by discouraging travel to affected areas and providing fast-track support to laboratories that are looking for an antidote.

Of course, this is the right response to a threat that may (I stress may) reach pandemic proportions. The 1914 Spanish flu, a variant of the H1N1 virus we now face, killed between 20 and 100 million people, depending on which reports you read.

The World Health Organization has raised the pandemic alert level from phase 3 to phase 4, out of a possible 6 levels. This means that the virus has now reached a level of sustained human-to-human transmission.

This week The Lancet¸ a widely-known and respected medical journal, issued a press release saying that it 'expects the number of those infected to increase and the spread of infection to expand.'

Meanwhile, The Times reports that hundreds of schoolchildren in New York may be infected with the virus and some US health authorities believe that the world is on track for a pandemic.

In this global village, though, too many people are prone to turn real public threats into self-seeking opportunities to build constituencies or sell products, agendas or ideologies.

Late last week, some British economists and politicians were telling us that it may take a generation for us to claw our way back to financial viability as a nation. Some no doubt have pure motives for saying this; others are doing so only for short-term political advantage.

The media, of course, gladly gobbles this kind of thing up and drip feeds it to the public over as many days as possible. Every 'angle' of the story is pursued. Nothing new of substance is uncovered most of the time, but the story is kept alive.

In the media, bad news sells; in politics, it diverts the public gaze - away from mistakes made.

Meanwhile out in the real world, where most of us live, 'be afraid, be very afraid' is the dominant after-taste following weeks of political and media football on the subject of recession.

This week, though, recession is becoming old news. So the headlines focus on a new cause for fear.