Swine flu fever

Whenever a public health official utters the word ‘pandemic’ in a deliberately calm tone of voice, it’s understandable that many people decide that it’s time to panic. The surprise, in the big flu panic/ pandemic of 2009, is not how quickly we panicked, but how quickly the news media declared that we were overreacting. Health officials raised the alarm on the last Sunday in April, and already the following Tuesday, the Washington Post was telling us the story was overblown. “Of course we’re doing too much to scare people,” Mark Feldstein, a former correspondent for NBC, ABC and CNN confessed to the Washington Post. “Cable news has 24 hours to fill, and there isn’t 24 hours of exciting news going on. If you scare people, they’ll tune in more.” “This is one of the hazards of 24-hour Internet-media-television,” MSNBC President Phil Griffin added. “It’s obviously a big story and you want to give it attention. I do think we have to be careful not to overstate it and not make people scared to death.” Absolved, then, of their duty to not be alarmist, the cable networks in particular made sure swine flu (more about the name in a minute) would fill the airwaves to satisfy an understandably jittery public. “Tonight, we’re going to give you the facts, not hype,” Anderson Cooper told his viewers on CNN on 27 April. Alas, the broadcast then descended into describing Mexico City in a “panic” and asserting matter-of-factly (and wrongly) “You have around 150 deaths in Mexico, as you have heard, but we don’t know how many that’s out of total.” Those incautious words — based on overblown estimates from the Mexican government — came from CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta, who had only recently turned down the nomination to be the US Surgeon General. “We’re having a hard time figuring out how deadly this is.” A writer for the Tulsa (Oklahoma) World newspaper only half-jokingly bought into the cable-TV panic. “Taking stock this weekend of CNN’s list of symptoms, I had all but one of ’em less than 48 hours upon my return from Mexico last month,” he said, dismissing his doctor’s diagnosis of an ordinary stomach bug. “But my Chicken Little mind-set may come in handy as fears simmer over this growing global malady.” To be sure, there were good reasons to pay close attention to this outbreak. One headline in The Independent