Ten thousand people have been killed by swine flu worldwide. According to the UK’s Chief Government Medical Officer, 6% of those hospitalized die of the disease or its complications. Is that a lot? In one year 30,000 die in traffic accidents across the EU alone, and nobody panics. How many of those hospitalized because of other strains of flu lose the battle? There’s something very strange going on.
As journalists without the specialized medical knowledge are required to voice opinions on the subject, we tend to report whatever emanates from the august halls of global medical science. If the WHO says so how can Malta Today question it? Is the rest of the world doing the same?
The fact remains that the novel nature of the H1N1 virus as well as the course of its progress since it was identified has led to the ringing of alarm bells across the world accompanied by a frenzied effort to produce and provide a vaccine. The response has been extraordinary. Is there something we have not been told?
The sudden and unwelcome appearance of a new influenza virus seems to have caught the medical world off guard. The ugly surprise may be making everyone more cautious because of not knowing what to expect. Will this virus follow the course taken by its predecessors or not? Having rapidly achieved pandemic status will it mutate into a more virulent form or join the cohorts of viruses and bacteria our bodies have learned to defeat?
The extraordinary response, the governments scrambling to secure supplies of vaccines which had not yet been developed, the vaccine testing procedures being curtailed coupled with what appears to be an anti-climax leaves us all a little uncertain and confused. The general impression is that science has not been able to provide us with the certainties we have come to demand from it and that we are being asked to act on the uncertain judgments of the experts.
In the end, choosing to take the vaccine or avoiding it will be a matter of personality and habit. If we have become used to taking the annual flu vaccine as a precaution, we are more likely to opt for vaccination than those of us who have chosen to soldier on without hypodermic alliances and feel that they have done well enough so far.
The question becomes a little thornier when it becomes a matter of deciding for somebody else. This virus appears to aim for children and healthy young adults. Even if we are inclined to ride out the storm without taking a vaccine ourselves, we may feel that it is a risk we cannot impose on others. The idea that they lie in a cohort at higher risk than ourselves may tip the balance in favour of immunizing them although we may make take the other option.
Hopefully in a few months’ time we will be able to look back at all this and be pleased that it was a massive false alarm. Most of us, if they care to remember Swine Flu at all, will dismiss it with a laugh. Some of us will still be curious about how it all came about, whether or not it was lab-derived, as claimed by Dr Adrian Gibbs – one of the developers of Tamiflu.
At this time the world is still trying to deal with the unknown and preparing for the worst. When that is over we should take time to discover whether we have built up immunity for panic and whether we need better laws and regulatory systems to govern what goes on in laboratories. Unearthing the Spanish influenza virus from the frozen graves of its Inuit victims appears to have been an epochal bad idea. How many other worse than bad ideas are being toyed with around the world? Will we ever be able to do anything about that?
Meanwhile one certainty is already available: GlaxoSmithCline is expected to make a windfall profit of billions in providing H1N1 vaccines to government health services around the world. Not bad for a global recession year.
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