Media, government didn’t overdo the swine flu thing
May 8, 2009 at 6:02 am by Ben Luongo
By Ben Luongo
PoHo contributor
It seems as though the threat of swine flu has died down. Despite that Florida has five confirmed cases and 22 probable cases, Florida high schools reopened their doors this week. This is because were finding out more and more that the swine flu isn’t all that different than a typical seasonal flu. If that’s the case, did the media and goverment overhype the threat of swine flu?
The swine flu is a new mutated string of influenza. There is little concern for traditional seasonal flues because we deal with them every year. We know what to expect and we have a firm foundation of health and safety here in the United States. However, a new mutated string of influenza challenges our health-related protocols. We had no idea how easily it could be spread, how severe the symptoms would be, or how fast the recovery time would be. In other words, we had no plan of attack; it was only prudent that we close high schools and have public announcements telling people to stay home if they are sick.
Here in the U.S. we think we have it under control, and we do, but in the beginning the swine flu spread across the world in just a week and a half. We might be talking about the swine flu being overhyped now, but the speed at which the unknown disease spread across the globe was indeed a threat. Our health and medical structures did not pass that test as far as containing the illness. And because it is spread across the world, it’s still a problem.
We determine the threat of an illness, not by what its symptoms are, but how we can treat it. Here in the U.S. we have a strong foundation in health and medicine that an influenza virus isn’t going to threaten us too much. However, other countries do not have that foundation, which means that same string of virus can cause more harm in other parts of the world. Go here to see the swine flu in other nations
Consider that other parts of the world are less prepared to deal with a new influenza virus and consider the speed at which it spread to those parts. Yes, the U.S. will recover just fine from this illness, but the safety measure and protocols that we took were not just for our safety; they were for the safety of other countries as well.
We are living in a globalizing world now, where the spread of disease will travel faster than it did 50 years ago. The safety measures we take now need to consider the health and safety of the world, not just us. This is why the swine flu seemed overhyped. Even now, the WHO is suggesting that up to 2 billion people could be infected if the situation worsens. We might be hearing about the swine flu in the news for a while.
