New Rules, Same Virus, Same Media

 

The World Health Organization has answered an ancient riddle:

 

Q: When is a pandemic not a pandemic.

 

A: When you call it something else.

 

The World Health Organization said Friday it would revise its rules for declaring a spreading disease a pandemic. The disease-du-jour, of course is H1N1, Swine Flu to its friends, and its rapid geographic spread a few weeks back was the cause of even more rapidly spreading silliness among governments, health organizations and the media.

 

Schools were closed, government offices darkened, dust masks were donned and handshaking, hugging and kissing became antisocial acts as the media went into Energizer Bunny journalism mode. When the W.H.O. raised its threat level to five on a six-point scale, so much dark suit/deep tone manure was spread that the few apparent facts had trouble fighting their way to the surface. Those that made it included:

 

·        The new flu spread rapidly, but no more rapidly than the usual annual flu.

·        The new flu could kill, but far fewer deaths have been connected to it than the routine thousands of deaths from even mild regular flu seasons.

·        Far from being new, the flu strain could have been circulating among pigs for years.

 

On the Monday after it announced it was rethinking things, W.H.O. figures showed almost13,000 confirmed H1N1 cases in 46 countries, with 92 deaths. The same day, a W.H.O. press release on yellow fever mentioned that disease’s estimated toll at 206,000 annual cases and 52,000 deaths.

 

Yellow fever, of course, suffers from bad press relations when compared to Swine Flu, and has been unable to grasp the same amount of worldwide public attention in spite of striking almost 16 times the victims of swine flu and taking 565 times the lives.

 

As far as what the new rules might be or whether Swine Flu might move from Stage 5 to Stage 6 in the Pandemic Pantheon, here’s what I was able to find on the W.H.O. website in the last paragraph of a May 18 report:

 

“Moving from Phase 5 to Phase 6

34. The current process is based purely on geographical spread and not on severity of disease. Several Member States spoke in favour of giving the Director-General greater flexibility in the progression between different phases.”

 

Although this quote is in International CratSpeak, and translation is a notoriously difficult art, it seems the gist is that Member States told the Director-General to lay off the alarm bell and stop scaring folks needlessly.

 

I could find no similar guidance on any of several media organization sites, but if the World Health Organization disease monitor process becomes rational, the media will respond as  they always have to news that contradicts news previously reported.

 

They’ll ignore it.

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