Germs without borders

LIMA, Peru – Beware: This is a scary story of sick proportions.

It begins in Japan.

In May I visited South Korea with a group of IU students. After we landed in Tokyo en route to Seoul, health officials dressed in blue paper suits and masks boarded our plane for a special health examination because of a threat of swine flu.

One health official, who was dressed more like a spaceman than a surveyor, went seat by seat, interrogating passengers about their symptoms, while another took each passenger’s temperature with a thermo-radar gun.

If for some reason a passenger’s answer was questionable, the officials marked off four rows in front of the questionable person’s seat and gave each person in the suspicious zone a paper mask to wear.

But even for all of the excitement, swine flu hasn’t proved to be as lethal as we feared. In Japan I was not privy to epic international germ-transmission. Crisis averted.
Or so I thought, until I arrived in Lima, Peru.

On the very first day, one of the girls in my group began to complain that her skin itched. She showed us her arms, which were covered in pink, nickel-sized welts that had spread as far as her neck.

She told us she had been in Tanzania and Kenya the week before, and we all feared the worst. Had she been bitten by malaria-transmitting insects, or did she have some strange African disease?

Images of terrible diseases infected my mind, and I imagined she had caught some yet-to-be-discovered, fatal strain of cholera.

I immediately regretted shaking her hand.

The next morning she was gone, and our group director told us that she had been taken to the hospital, but no one could say what was wrong.

She didn’t return to class the next day, or the day after. Finally, on the third day, our professor told us that after seeing three doctors, they figured out she was experiencing an allergic reaction to a Tanzanian plant.

No swine flu. No cholera. Just plain old allergies.

But the scary thing about the whole episode was what might have been. In this age when a girl who just returned from South Korea and another girl fresh back from Africa can be on the same plane to South America, the emergence of a worldwide pandemic is not only possible, but also probable.

I was annoyed by the media’s exaggeration of the swine flu threat and by the Japanese inspectors’ extreme caution. But the fact remains that maybe they were right all along. Are we prepared for a health crisis in this age, when it is so easy to crisscross the globe?

No, and honestly we can’t ever hope to be. The threat of a global pandemic seems to be an unfortunate side effect of our modern, interconnected world – one we should take with a little increased caution and a Pisco Sour, because it’s unavoidable.