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Why the Big Deal
By David Glenn Cox
We’ve all been hearing the fear mongering of the news media in regards to the swine flu. Then there's the foolishness about renaming the disease to placate certain religious groups and, of course, the pork industry.
The world governments have been Johnny-on-the-spot either to accept acclaim or jeers for their reactions to the flu, depending on your political persuasion. But these governments know that the worst failing possible for a government is appearing to be impotent in the face of a crisis. Of seeming unable to aid or rescue their people in any way.
The 1918-1920 Spanish flu killed upwards of one hundred million people worldwide. No one knows for sure because it depends on time and place and in some cases there was a complete breakdown of record keeping. While most flu strains target the very old and the very young, the Spanish flu attacked those in the flower of youth. It was especially lethal to teenagers and pregnant women.
The flu was made worse by the extensive travel of millions of soldiers, in the prime demographic age, returning home from WW1. Some soldiers slept on the decks of the troop ships rather than brave the confined conditions in the bowels of the vessel.
My own parents grew up in the 1930’s and told me of signs put up by the county on people's front doors. The signs said“Quarantine,” and the color of the sign denoted the illness. My father had whooping cough and their house was quarantined. If you entered you stayed; only the doctor was exempt. Family and neighbors would leave food on the porch and breaking the quarantine was unthinkable.
In most cases these were the only tools medical science had to fight an epidemic. Meager though they were, it still showed the populace that the government was doing everything in its power to protect the citizenry. America in the early 1900’s was a nation of farmers and small towns and the quarantine system worked well to localize epidemics.
Your neighbors would tend to your fields or livestock, employers never griped or complained about employees quarantined; it was, after all, the law. But we live in a different nation today. We get angry if our overnight letter is an hour late; tens of thousands of people board airliners and fly thousands of miles and get angry if they are even an hour late. The numbers shopping in stores and riding commuter trains and crowded city elevators should give one pause. If we were to have an outbreak of a Spanish flu type virus there would be no stopping it.
The recent swine flu outbreak illustrates this; the first deaths were recorded in the last week of flu season, and within two weeks the virus had reached almost every continent on the planet. Had this been the Spanish flu, the morgues would be full right now. Those affected in 1918 were, for the most part, rural and they understood what quarantine meant. Today if they shut down the schools parents would send their teenagers to the mall to hang out. Mothers would still go to the gym or to yoga class or take their kids to soccer practice.
Parents would be screaming at day care providers shut down by a quarantine just as the day care providers themselves would be screaming at government agencies to allow their daycare centers to reopen. Employers would be leaning on employees to show up for work and soon someone sick would show up. Then, within a week, the employer would have no more employees or perhaps the employees no employer.
The sick would do as they always do and seek attention in America's emergency rooms. The rooms would become like the bowels of the troop ships in 1918, a place where the healthy become sick and the sick go to die. The health care worker ranks would become decimated and doctors would stop showing up for work. The numbers in the emergency room would require police to control the crowds, and soon they too would begin to succumb.
The symptoms of the 1918 strain were: a healthy individual would be struck suddenly and within hours become too weak to walk, dying in many cases within twenty-four hours. Others would by struck by nausea and vomiting and diarrhea and their skin would take on blue tint, as their lungs would begin to fill with blood and fluid. While in most communities less than a third of the population came down with the disease, the fear of the disease or the mourning of those lost to the disease brought communal life to a standstill.
In some cities telephone exchanges shut down. Bodies were buried in mass graves, as gravediggers and funeral homes couldn’t keep up with demand. Whole communities and families were wiped out as social workers knocked on the doors of tenements to check on residents not seen by neighbors recently. In some cases they would find the parents dead in bed with small children hungry and playing on the floor. So many children were rounded up that orphanages were overwhelmed. They rented trains and carried the children to farm communities. On the orphan trains the children would be lined up at the railroad depot and willing farm families could sign the papers and take a child or two home with them. Then the remaining children would reboard the train and ride until the next stop.
The fear by governments is real; the fear-mongering by the media is to be expected. The over reaction of pundits and politicians decrying political motive is calculated wagering. The chances that this swine flu will be another 1918 style pandemic is slim and if they're wrong about it millions will die and few will remember their posturing. But with all our technology and our computers, our MRI machines and centers for disease control, there is no stopping it should it occur.
Our ability to travel rapidly anywhere on the face of the planet makes us acutely vulnerable. The fingers pointing as to where it started and who the carriers are is missing the point entirely. It can start anywhere and it will go everywhere. We live with smug certainty that we can conquer any foe, political, biological or medical, but in this we can’t; we literally don’t stand a chance. We might develop a vaccine in a year or eighteen months, but if a Spanish flu-type virus were to strike the United States, thirty million people might be dead before that vaccine went into the first test subject.
This is not something than can happen, this is something that will happen.
Maybe not this year or next, maybe not in your lifetime or in mine. But it will happen some day.
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