The swine flu patient who didn’t cry wolf
As AJ Sundar awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic swine—or at least that’s what the media would have you think. Yes, I had a confirmed case of swine flu over this past summer, and yes, I survived the terrible disease. I didn’t even get a lame congratulatory T-shirt of the sort given out after roller coaster rides. Instead, I had a fairly high fever for a night and mild cold symptoms for the remainder of the week—and this is coming from the same person who breaks out in fever at the mere mention of the word.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that people have panicked over the mere mention of dire-sounding viruses, and said viruses never live up to the hype. SARS only infected just over 8,000 people in the entire world over the course of six years, and even fewer died from it. Only 3,630 were infected by the dreaded West Nile Virus, and of that only 3.4 percent of all cases were fatal, resulting in a total death count of 124. And of course, let’s not forget anthrax, which, while not a virus, still managed to claim an entire five lives. To put these numbers in perspective, 90 people in the United States die from lightning strikes every year—every person terrified of these viral diseases should be at least equally terrified of thunderstorms.
However, despite the hard facts clearly showing that these outbreaks are far from a big deal, every single year the scare stories are rolled out, and every single year people panic yet again. My faith in humanity is constantly undermined by people’s mortal fear of these mild diseases, their fear triggered because they flipped on the local news and saw a scary looking powder, pig, mosquito or Asian. Perhaps most disturbing of all is that this panic cycle repeats itself every year. When will we learn our lesson? Each time a panic occurs, it quickly dies down once the news passes on, and yet the terror resets itself the very next year as if this time it was somehow justified when it wasn’t the year before.
Ultimately, we somehow manage to forget about the boy that cried wolf, thinking that this time the diseases really are worth fearing. It sounds so much scarier to die from something as scary sounding as “swine flu,” but for every second we worry about contracting the virus, we should worry a thousand times more about entering a car—the chance of death is millions of times greater. Once put into perspective, these panics are complete jokes, and we seem completely doomed to repeat history over and over ad infinitum. As for myself, life goes on. I still want that t-shirt though.
Mrs. Steele,
Thanks for your response. While there are legitimate concerns for the swine flu in the case of small children and the elderly, the target audience of my column (and indeed, most of my columns) is and will remain to be the students of Washington University. Most, if not all, students are neither children nor elderly, and for the overwhelming majority of the student body, the chances of death or serious illness from the swine flu is slim to none.
Consequently, I believe that the University should be spending their time, money, and effort on things more relevant to the student body rather than putting hand sanitizer dispensers in every building on campus (a point I should have, in retrospect, emphasized). Perhaps such an investment would have made more sense in a daycare facility or primary school, but at a college where most students are between the ages of 18-30 (including grad students), the risk of death is extremely small.
As for your last paragraph, I have to say I strongly disagree. While it is sad that children have died from the swine flu, just think about how many more children have died from getting hit by a car. Those children, as well as their parents, suffer equally, and yet we don’t see headlines across the nation panicking over the (likely much higher than swine flu) number of children who die each year from traffic accidents. Ultimately, millions of children die each year from a myriad of causes, and this is reality – life is not perfectly safe, nor will it ever be. Panicking, however, does nothing other than create confusion and hysteria over something that deserves neither. For every family that suffers from the death of their child due to swine flu, 100 families suffer from the death of their child due to accidents with motor vehicles. Drawing inordinate attention to an incredibly small number of deaths due to swine flu trivializes the far greater number of deaths due to several other factors.
AJ Sundar
So you had swine flu and survived, good for you. I understand the annoyance at the “panic” mode that some people jump into without hesitation, due to the media hype & other sources of exaggerated fear. There are people who love the drama and will panic for the sake of it, however, please understand that, on occasion, people do “panic” for reasons that are very real. As the parent of a three year old who attends public daycare, I can tell you that it kills me to send him there every day, knowing all the germs he’s coming in contact with from his classmates.
Understand that it’s a very different “perspective” when you have a child and you care about someone’s welfare besides your own. As parents, we are all but powerless to protect our children from this virus that could kill them – no matter how many times they wash their hands. As a parent, it doesn’t really make me feel any better that a “small” percentage of the people who have contracted swine flu have actually died. People seem to want to use that factoid as a crutch to make them feel better, to help them worry less – but talk to the families of any one of those people who have passed away and see how good they feel about that statistic.
In the past 3 days, I have read 2 news stories – one of a 5 year old boy in TN and the other of an 11 year old girl in Dallas who both died from the swine flu and did NOT have any underlying chronic medical conditions. Those stories were not media “hype” – THEY ACTUALLY HAPPENED. By virus standards, the swine flu may not be so “deadly” overall, but the fact that it currently has the ability to spread like wildfire (and it IS), is also a fear factor because that makes it so much “easier” for children like my son who do have respiratory conditions to catch it, and for children like him, it can become very deadly very quickly.
So, while it may not be killing off half the world’s population, please excuse me if I don’t sit back and assume the selfish attitude of “Oh, it’s not so bad, and chances are it won’t affect me that much anyway”. Please. It’s that kind of attitude that lets people feel like they don’t need to take extra care to wash their hands, cover their cough, and they don’t give a damn about whether or not they’re spreading this nasty virus to innocent children, who are one of the groups most likely to develop severe complications and/or die from it.
Yes, many, many people have contracted swine flu and survived, and for those that did not, let’s not overshadow that just because there weren’t “enough” of them to make a large part of the population feel like we have to “panic”. Perspective is the result of many different things, and everyone has their own – one isn’t more “right” that the other.