I’ve been asked to write an article on the political language of bird flu, specifically as it relates to the recent battles over viral samples from China and Indonesia. I’ll be focusing upon China, and discussing how public health is pretty much synonymous with politics these days. Basically, everything about global public health as it concerns bird flu has been turned into political maneuvering. It’s a fascinating and completely muddy topic. Just slogging my way through the media accounts is difficult.
For anyone interested, there is a site which lists all the stories and blogs about bird flu. You can find it at :
http://www.birdflubreakingnews.com/
It’s up-to-date and exhausting. Even without the hype, the stories are endless. Bird flu is a topic that seems to have entirely captured our imaginations. What does it stand for? Our fears about globalization? Our discomfort with “others” and anything “foreign”? There is actually a headline from the BBC not long ago that read “Duck with Bird Flu Not from UK”. Really? Even ducks have nationalities now? Do they need passports, too?
Pardon my skepticism. I’m not saying that bird flu as a real biological entity doesn’t exist. Clearly, it does. I’m also not saying it doesn’t have the potential to harm a lot of people. Obviously, it does. What I do question, however, is the language of risk, danger and foreignness surrounding it. I’m concerned that localized outbreaks are being made into global events by a collusion between media – eager for a story, and government – eager for a reason to broker power and scare people. Disease is a very effective weapon for terrifying a populace. And terrified citizens are more likely to approve of increased spending in order to “protect” them from the latest bogeymen. Bird flu being just one case-in-point.
So, this is what I am working on now. I’m knee deep in it, and I have no idea how I’m going to wrestle this down into something readable and understandable. It’s such a big topic, I’m not sure I can make that much sense of it myself.
Really, it’s not becoming a global event because of media and government but because a pandemic *would* be a global event.
Right now there are outbreaks of human infections scattered around Asia, the Middle East and Africa, but the virus is mutating and acquring the changes necessary to become easily transmitted from person to person. When that happens it will spread beyond Indonesia, Viet Nam, Cambodia, China, Egypt, and Nigeria.
Unfortunately the fatality rate in people who have been infected worldwide is over 60%. In Indonesia it’s 85%. And scientists are saying that this would not need to decrease.
During the 1918 flu the fatality rate was somewhere between 2 and 5%. 50 million people died.
Schools may close for up to three months during each wave, and people may be told to stay in their homes to reduce the number of infections.
We don’t need to worry about governments scaring people. We need to worry that they aren’t telling people to prepare.
We don’t need to worry about governments scaring people. We need to worry that they are not warning people.
I realise that the Bird-Flu virus/pandemic is a mouth watering subject for any one as a global conspiracy.
The said conspiracy could originate from various Governments, commercial interests- including of course The Donald Rumsfeld connection:)- and all kind of other evil sources.
On the other hand the the threat from the virus could well be real.
I have been keeping an eye of the actual real events related to the outbreaks of this virus for just over three years now.
All I can tell you for certain is that the virus seems to be slowly but surely creeping from the East (from China where it apparently originated from-why do most of these viruses seem to start up in China?) to the West.
Also, each year, the number of the human infections and fatalities is much higher than the year before.
Mind you, the total numbers of human infections and deaths resulting from H5N1 are still relatively very small.
There has been a lot of research in to the virus around the world and in fact today, there are two IMPORTANT news items related to this subject.
The first relates to the discovery of the fact that different versions of H5N1 infect humans in a different way.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070716191800.htm
The second news item is regarding a disappointing discovery, that disabling the body’s destructive immune-system overreaction to the H5N1 avian influenza virus, known as “cytokine storm,” would NOT lead to new lifesaving treatments.
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/avianflu/news/jul1607cytokine.html
Credit for gathering these two news items, goes as usual, to http://www.birdflubreakingnews.com.
So I hope that you will start your research with an OPEN mind and not be a simple pusher of the global conspiracy theories!
Hope to see more from you.