Flu? You Swine!

Well I haven’t gotten the H1N1-A virus yet have you? I didn’t think so. I don’t mean to diminish the actual danger posed by the identification of a new strain of influenza virus but didn’t you think the media went a little bit nuts over the last couple of weeks?

It was top story on every newscast for about 10-days. All of them network, local, cable, they all jumped on the bandwagon. The only thing that got in the way was Arlen Spector jumping parties. I’m not sure which was a greater threat to the public at large.

Okay, I’m just kidding about Spector. I did love the reaction from some of the pundits and all of the Republican Party leadership (how’s that for an oxymoron for our times?). Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader John Boehner were shocked, Shocked! to find there was politics being played by a member of the United States Senate! Republican Party Chair Michael Steele accused Spector of leaving the GOP to “further his political interests.”

Looks like I missed the memo that if a politician engages in politics there’s some kind of foul. Of course I always find it amusing when one politician calls another politician a “politician,” or, worse yet, a Washington Politician! This is most frequently done by someone seeking, but not yet elected to, a seat in one of the houses of the congress…in Washington. All this nonsense does make it easier to understand why they decided to stop calling the H1N1-A virus the “Swine Flu.” No doubt it hit too close to home for many politicians.

We’re told that they stopped calling the virus the “Swine Flu” because people were afraid to eat pork. Yup, people really are that stupid. Thank God we didn’t have an outbreak of German Measles or some nut job would have taken out half of Western Europe.

There hasn’t been a single case of the H1N1-A virus in Egypt so far but as I write this the Egyptian government has begun liquidating the entire inventory of pigs there because…umm…it’s the Swine Flu. If you’ve ever wondered what happened to Egypt after the pyramids, now you know. Me, I’m looking forward to eating pork chops at reduced prices.

So as frenzied as things have been in the media here, it must be even worse there. But I’m not in Egypt. I’m in Manchester, New Hampshire, and it seems like they’re trying to scare the bejeezis out of me for no particular reason but that it’s an easy story. Last time I checked (Monday, May 04, 2009) the Granite State had exactly one (1) confirmed case of the H1N1-A virus. That’s out of a population of somewhere around 1-point-3 million people.

As I write this there has been exactly one (yes that’s -1-) fatality in these United States. That out of about 304-million people. I’m not planning on kissing any pigs in the near future, in part because I don’t drink any more, so with a reasonable amount of caution I’m probably pretty safe.

I’m sure there is a possible threat to public health from this virus. Virus’s don’t live very long so they can evolve through several generations in a short period and come back to take another crack at us. But once the media got around to telling us to wash our hands often and to stay home when we’re feeling ill there wasn’t much else we needed to know.

Oh sure it’s nice to have the information that the appropriate government agencies are taking the appropriate steps to monitor the progress of the spread of the virus, quarantine those who appear to have contracted it and they are working on a vaccine for it. But that didn’t really change the true nature of the story. The important thing is that the medical people and public health officials stay on it. They will.

So your smiling local newsie pretty much beat the same drum all week until they realized it wasn’t much of a problem and it wasn’t killing gazillions of people around the globe and now they’re starting to drift away from the story. Tonight it was the number three story on the CBS evening news. It’s not much but it’s progress.

Back when telephone had wires that were connected to more wires on poles along the side of the road Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota once observed, “The media are like birds on a telephone wire. When one flies off, they all fly off. When one flies back, they all fly back.”

Be on the lookout, they could come back.