Avoiding a Pig’s Breakfast: Swine Flu Politics

Governments don’t do the business of combating pandemics well. While we should be relieved when health officials leap at the opportunity to protect, quarantine and save, we should also be slightly skeptical. A cough might signal immediate detention. A rush to the toilet might suggest that a doomsday scenario is nigh. The response to the swine flu influenza, less romantically known as swine influenza A (H1N1), is testing governments and public will alike. But it remains to be seen whether cool and calm heads prevail.

Sadly, calmness is usually the first casualty when reacting to pandemics. The response of the Ford administration to swine flu in 1976 was an abysmal failure. F. David Matthews, US secretary of health, education and welfare, was convinced that the US would ‘see a return to the 1918 flu virus that is the most virulent form of the flu. In 1918 a half million Americans died.’ The projections for 1976: that the virus would kill one million Americans.

The hounds of hysteria were unleashed. Unfortunately for those doomsday prophets in the administration, they were damned less by the virus than their response to it. Even after evidence was adduced showing that the strain in 1976 was far less virulent than that of 1918, the die had been cast. The flu vaccination program that followed had far more nasty side effects than the virus itself. Several deaths were reported (the causal links have been disputed), followed by subsequent lawsuits and the destruction of the vaccine.

The 1976 fiasco keeps company with the disturbed response by several countries in their efforts to combat SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in 2003. The facemask became a common feature of travel and living that year, despite evidence that the condition was less contagious than thought. This did not stop countries from China, where it originated, to the US, from falling into a state of collective psychosis.

All of this is not to say that the situation should not be taken seriously. Why, for instance, did the Mexican authorities keep silent till hundreds of cases had been found? Either the authorities overreact, or don’t react at all. The current figures stand at some 159 deaths, with 2,400 people infected. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are 91 cases across 10 states in the US. A Mexican toddler, who arrived with his parents on a visit to the US, recently died from it. Three have been found in Germany; four in Spain; five in Britain. The World Health Organisation has bumped up the pandemic category to ‘5’ (‘human-to-human spread of the virus into at least two countries in one WHO region’), with ‘6’ being the most serious.

Measures have been implemented seeking to contain the virus. Schools, gyms, restaurants and other areas of public gathering have been closed in Mexico City. Individual cases of school closure have been reported in other countries. Some of these measures might prove needless and even ineffective. Organizations such as the WHO have argued that travel restrictions are simply silly measures with little or no effect.

This has not prevented several countries from considering travel bans, which will have the effect of estranging Mexico. Cuba and Argentina have banned flights to the country. The French health minister Roselyne Bachelot will try to convince her colleagues in Luxembourg on Thursday that a similar ban will protect and save Europe from the flu.

What is required, not merely with this pandemic, but with other conventional killers, is a global, coordinated effort that is effective yet restrained. Swine flu is lethal, but so are numerous other infections that rage against human populations. Other killers have been forgotten in the fuss (malaria, HIV/AIDS). If nothing else, we might have swine flu to thank for galvanizing international efforts in combating potentially more serious pandemics. Or we just might make a pig’s breakfast of it all.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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