June 3, 2008
The WHO now reports 816 flu deaths worldwide, since the first cases in March. Seasonal flu, it says, kills 250,000 to 500,000 people each year, or 744 to 1488 deaths. So after over four months, we’ve finally got swine flu cases equal to those at the lower end of the range for a single day of seasonal flu.
For the U.S., deaths are equivalent to what we’d see in one or two days of seasonal flu during the season.And that’s your pandemic panic update.
I agree, gratefully, that the numbers are mercifully small. That’s scarce comfort to the family of the Brazilian girl who died en route home from Florida (see below), and others who have lost loved ones.
But Fumento is absolutely right. Given the millions who die every day, H1N1 is almost unnoticeable. And I seriously doubt that it will suddenly mutate into a monster that murders us in our beds next October.
Compared to deaths from malaria, HIV/AIDS, TB, diarrhea, and a host of other ills that flesh is heir to, swine flu is not a big deal.
But note that Fumento doesn’t even blink at the mortality of seasonal flu. He takes it as a given, a cost of doing business. Half a million deaths a year? And our point is?
Northrop Frye, our greatest Canadian scholar, once observed that insanity is a social judgment, not a medical diagnosis. And some deaths are more an issue of social and cultural judgment than something defined by a coroner’s report.
On September 11, 2001, 3,000 people died in the Al-Qaeda attacks. Those deaths weighed far more in American culture and politics than any others in that year…which included 30,000 Americans killed by gunshot wounds, half of them self-inflicted.
In other words, the US suffers ten 9/11 mortalities every year, and has done so since at least the 1960s. Put it another way: Americans inflict another Vietnam on themselves about every two years, just by pulling the trigger on one another or themselves.
These deaths draw, at most, a day’s attention in the local media, unless it’s some wretched teenager shooting his classmates. That might get three days’ coverage.
The public-health consequences of 30,000 violent deaths a year are effectively ignored, just like the estimated 36,000 seasonal flu deaths and who knows how many traffic deaths.
They simply don’t matter to Americans or anyone else, any more than the rapes and murders committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan that resulted directly from 9/11. All deaths are equal, but some are more equal than others.
So what interests me about H1N1 and H5N1 is the cultural impact of these new diseases, and what that tells us about ourselves. It’s the rare and unusual that draws our attention: we have lots of flu blogs, but precious few about malaria and TB and dengue. We shrug off deaths from such causes, but a new flu virus throws us into spasms of anxiety.
As a result, the multi-billion-dollar tourism industry in Mexico is in huge trouble. The airline industry worldwide is hemorrhaging money. Pork producers now know what it’s like to be collateral damage. Public-school budgets from Florida to Queensland to Cape Town are going to suffer, and don’t even talk about the financial stress on health-care systems worldwide.
Whatever bird flu has been in epidemiological terms, it’s been an economic disaster from Nigeria to Pakistan to China to Indonesia. H1N1 has been even worse, however few and forgettable its human casualties have been.
And whatever the epidemiological impact of H1N1, its cultural, social, political and economic impacts are far greater. That, not its absolute numbers, is why it deserves our attention. To laugh at the numbers of dead is to miss the point completely.
Filed under: DISEASE
Tags: DISEASE, epidemic, flu, H1N1
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