Paranoia Flu

As the school year draws to a close for IU students, the world scrambles to make sense of the threat of a possible pandemic. It is suspected that swine flu has killed 101 people worldwide since the World Health Organization declared the threat, though infection rates seem to be stabilizing, not increasing.

This has not stopped governments from preparing for the worst, however. Instead of acting like hysterical teenage girls, countries should meet this crisis with a calculated response, not a knee-jerk reaction.

It appears that in times of fear, irrational behavior spreads faster than the threat itself. In New York, the health care system is being overwhelmed by visitors who are paranoid that they have been infected, even though Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on Friday that no new cases have been confirmed. In fact, those that have been diagnosed with the disease exhibit only minor flu symptoms and are getting better.

As communicable diseases go, air travel is viewed as a breeding ground. With the fear of swine flu on everybody’s mind, flights are being diverted and passengers exhibiting any kind of respiratory signs are treated like a terrorist threat.

At the Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport on Tuesday night, two passengers on a flight from Cancun, Mexico were reported exhibiting flu-like symptoms while in the air. Once the plane had landed the two were isolated and examined while the rest of the passengers had to remain on the plane. The tests proved that the men had not contracted the dreaded H1N1 strain, but were in fact drunk.

Globally, countries have been taking to the threat in a variety of ways. In an effort to appear proactive in the fight against swine flu, Egypt has ordered the slaughter of all the pigs in the country. Unfortunately for Egypt – which has had no reported cases of the disease – a live pig has nothing to do with contracting the feared influenza. Egypt has had a poor past when it comes to crisis planning, but appearing preemptive does no one any good when the preparation fails to save lives.

Egypt is not the only country participating in public relations moves instead of actual preventive measures. Iraq has declared that three wild boars residing in the Baghdad Zoo will be killed in an effort to stave off the flu. The country has even gone a step further and has banned the hunting of wild boars in the region, essentially ignoring the World Health Organization’s insistence that there is no danger in eating properly prepared pork.

Even while most governments understand that pigs are not harbingers of doom, many are still taking extraordinary precautions. In Hong Kong, guests were effectively trapped in a hotel for a week after a Mexican traveler was identified as having swine flu. Police descended on the hotel in surgical masks and sealed off the building, refusing to let any visitors (mostly tourists) leave.

An infectious disease expert criticized the government’s response as an overreaction.