Will panic combat swine flu?

The current panic over swine flu took me back to an incident from my early days in school. One day, a boy in my class developed high fever and was sent to the infirmary to rest. He overslept, was a little late in catching the school bus and was reprimanded by the teacher on duty with a (uncalled for) slap on the face.

The following day, the boy’s mother was in school complaining that her son had developed “105 degrees fever” because he had been slapped. The principal, believing that this was an indulgent parent, was furious. In pique, she called a boarder from the same class to her room, gave him a tight slap across the face and thundered, “Tell me, do you have 105 degrees fever?”

The stunned boarder shook his head in the negative, the indignant principal went back to her work and the parent went home stupefied. Soon after, the boarder went back to his class and narrated the recent experience to some of his friends, a few of whom complained of high fever by the end of the day and skipped school for the next few days.

So, after two eventful days, there was a clutch of boys with high psychosomatic fever instead of only one who was genuinely ill. The poor boarder, I suspect, must be still wondering why he had been slapped by his principal in the first place.

I don’t intend to make light of the threat from swine flu, but overreaction is certainly not a solution. Several people have died in India, several hundred across the world, and every life is precious. But a crisis demands a rational approach, not needless panic. The number of deaths as a percentage is minuscule compared to those infected as yet. We all have major insecurities about health, but in such situations we must yield to the scientific method rather than conjecture and abject fear.

Should we then be flummoxed that the country’s death tally from H1N1 went down by two between Thursday and Friday? Many people saw this as bizarre but to me it is symptomatic of the ineptitude with which the problem has been handled yet by the government — at the health ministry and public relations levels.

The extent of under-preparedness when the flu had already hit half the world six months earlier is shocking. In a globalised world inundated by frequent travel between countries, it is foolish to believe any part of this planet would be exempt from such a rapidly spreading virus.

The health minister then compounded the problem with his foot-in-the-mouth disease after the tragic death of Reeda Shaikh. His lack of knowledge was camouflaged in ill-conceived nonchalance and triggered off panic rather than the rapid awareness that was needed.

The media has not been blameless in the spread of fear either. The nature of competitive media is to hunt down a good story, and this is often shaped by the way it is received from sources considered reliable — in such cases, largely the government and medical authorities — though there should be no compromise on due diligence. Perhaps when the current pandemonium dies down, everybody will be chastened.

A pandemic refers to the geographical spread of an epidemic, not its intensity. Most of the reaction — across the world and not just in India — has been as though if millions are affected, half of them will die. All evidence so far points to the contrary; indeed there is enough evidence to suggest that this flu can either be evaded, or easily tided over with basic hygiene care and rest.  

There are more people dying every day even now of malaria, say, and as John McConnell editor of the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal says pithily in an answer to a question, “What swine flu, and the media reaction to it, does highlight is our willingness to accept the “routine” toll of infectious diseases with little apparent concern.”

That is not just a paradox, but also perhaps the tragedy.