Bill Jamieson: It's far too early to be hitting the panic button

Published on Thursday 30 April 2009 22:55

YES, we really are on the edge of a swine flu Armageddon pandemic: so much so that Iain and Dawn Askham, the Polmont couple who were detained in Monklands hospital, have hired the publicist Max Clifford.

It could not be to shield them from the baying mob of the Press. They were, after all, in an isolation unit. It is, apparently, to "sell their story". And what bigger story could there be? Earlier this week a World Health Organisation official intoned on the BBC Today programme that 40 per cent of people in Britain may catch swine flu, while another expert was quoted as saying that 1.2 million could die.

The terrible thought occurs that if every person suspected of having swine flu now contacts Max Clifford to "tell their story", we are going to need a pandemic of Max Cliffords. At the prospect of that my body temperature is starting to rise and I feel waves of nauseous fever coming on. Who should I phone with the symptoms? NHS Direct? Or Max Clifford Associates?

No-one can doubt the fear and consternation endured by those who have returned from a Mexican honeymoon to find that they may have fallen victim to this virus. And few will question the need to take sensible precautions. There is also every likelihood that the death toll in Mexico will rise and those suspected of infection will increase.

But as Christopher Booker, author with food expert Dr Richard North, of Scared to Death, a book on major panics, obliges us to ask, is this a pandemic, or a pandemic of panic?

There are in Scotland, so far, 27 suspected cases, and the number across the UK diagnosed with swine flu currently stands at eight. The good news is that in the UK at least the infections have proved mild so far, and that Mr and Mrs Askham were safely discharged from Monklands yesterday after their ordeal and able to return home to friends and family.

We need to be vigilant. In Mexico, where the outbreak was first detected, the restrictions on public meeting and movement have had to be severe.

But here in the UK a sense of proportion is surely due. Yet what chance is there of that, given our propensity to panic at every threat?

We cannot seem to go long without a Great Scare. We wobbled over salmonella in eggs. We cowered before the Millennium Bug. We shivered over BSE. And we were in a thorough flap over Bird Flu.

It was almost inevitable that at some stage in the coverage of swine flu experts would make reference to the outbreak of Spanish flu just after the end of the First World War in which some 50 million people died.

Now we are told that there are 50 million worth of face masks on order – even though some medical experts say they are of little use.

And every home is to be leafleted on the dangers of sneezing without a tissue and on the virtues of washing hands. Quite when these leaflets will flutter on to our doormats is unclear. But it will, I suspect, be long after massive coverage on television, radio and in the Press has already hammered home such precautions a hundredfold.

This proneness to assume the worst possible outcome is now a notable feature of modern life – and it is by no means confined to the UK. In November 2002 the first official case of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) was recorded in Guangdong Province, China.

Panic ensued. Lack of detailed knowledge as to its causes and consequences was no barrier to the spread of massive disruption. Airline travel was hit and hotel occupancy in Hong Kong plunged from more than 80 per cent to less 15 per cent. In Beijing, occupancy rates of the city's five-star hotels plunged below 2 per cent.

A frenzy of 24-hour media reporting and speculative comment transmitted the panic across borders. In North America, parents kept their children from school in Toronto and across the US there was a boycott of Chinese restaurants. In the words of Dr David Baltimore, Nobel prize winner in medicine: "People clearly have reacted to it with a level of fear that is incommensurate with the size of the problem."

The full cost of the dislocation caused by the Sars outbreak will never be known. But it is estimated at anything up to $100 billion. Across Asia, economies were disrupted. Yet when the storm passed, morbidity and mortality rates were modest by epidemiological standards. Only around 8,000 people were infected and fewer than 1,000 died.

On BSE (1996), the government's chief scientist, Dr John Pattison, warned that the death toll could reach 500,000. The Millennium Bug Scare (1999) is estimated to have cost $300 billion, those countries that had not spent fortunes protecting their computers faring no worse than those that had.

It's notable this time around that financial markets have held firm this week, despite all the dire forebodings. But why do we seem more prone to such medieval panics today, when we have huge resources of medical knowledge and technology?

It may be that our scepticism over government grows with its size and writ. And there may be a desire by the authorities not to be "caught napping" or being seen to be complacent: therefore the worst-case scenario is invoked as a realistic outcome before we have a real grip on the nature and scale of the threat.

Even in the depths of recession, millions travel to and from foreign destinations. And 24-hour media has played a part in rolling health scare stories round the earth in seconds – updating for every hourly news summary. How relieved the Downing Street bunker must be that this one is still rolling on.

Had it not been for swine fever, I suspect we would have spent more time this week fretting over the "quiet sun" story and the implications of a global cool spell: a sort of global warming in reverse. Perhaps Max Clifford could be hired to help the global warmers keep up their media profile. But I'm with the "quiet sun" mob today: we could all now do with cooler heads.